An Ultra Low-Cost Cluster Based on Low-End FPGAs
Mariano Aguirre Hernández, Alberto Antonio Del Barrio, Guillermo Botella · 2018
The need for high-performance and low-power computing is a hot topic nowadays. The most important companies are integrating FPGAs to achieve this because of their reconfigurability as well as their ability to work as efficient accelerators. In this work we propose a cluster of low-end Cyclone V FPGAs which are embedded within the DE1-SoC boards, which possess an ARM dual-core. A Debian 8-based operating system has been developed to include OpenCL support as well as a fast network connection. Several benchmarks have been parallelized for the cluster and a 56 logic core workstation, and results show that the cluster is more energy efficient (up to 83% energy reduction) with a cost nearly 6 times inferior to that of the workstation.