Axel: A Heterogeneous Cluster with FPGAs and GPUs

Kuen Hung Tsoi and Wayne Luk
Imperial College London


Abstract

This paper describes a heterogeneous computer cluster called Axel. Axel contains a collection of nodes, and each node can include multiple types of accelerators such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). A Map-Reduce framework for the Axel cluster is presented which exploits spatial and temporal locality through different types of processing elements and communication channels. The Axel system enables the first demonstration of FPGAs, GPUs and CPUs running collaboratively for N-body simulation. Over 30 times performance improvement has been achieved using our approach, which shows that the Axel system can combine the benefits of the specialization of FPGA, the parallelism of GPU, and the scalability of computer clusters.