Award year: 2018
Category: Other Award
Awarding organization: HiPEAC Network, Steering Committee
The paper “OpenCL-based FPGA Design to Accelerate the Nodal Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Unstructured Meshes” by Tobias Kenter, Gaurav Mahale, Samer Alhaddad, Yevgen Grynko, Christian Schmitt, Ayesha Afzal, Frank Hannig, Jens Förstner, and Christian Plessl received the HiPEAC 2018 Paper Award.
In this work, the authors mapped a high-order numerical method (the nodal discontinuous Galerkin method on unstructured meshes) onto FPGA hardware using OpenCL. They exploited the method's computational intensity and on-chip memory to maximize data reuse, decoupled memory accesses to maintain high bandwidth, and developed wide datapaths with many floating-point units. As a result, their FPGA implementation (using Intel/Altera tools) achieved approximately twice the performance of a multithreaded CPU reference.
The research was part of the BMBF-funded HighPerMeshes project, underlining its importance for the European high-performance computing community. The HiPEAC Paper Award is given by the HiPEAC Steering Committee to HiPEAC members who present full papers at a select set of top-tier systems and architecture conferences. The award recognizes high-quality, relevant research and helps raise Europe’s visibility in global computing research.
Certificate: https://en.ei.uni-paderborn.de/tet/news-article/hipeac-paper-award