FPGA Infrastructure

Hardware Overview

The software environment is setup using modules, see section Software Overview. For hardware execution, FPGA nodes with the correct configuration and driver version (so-called board support package or BSP) need to be allocated, see section FPGA System Access to FPGA Partition.

Software Overview

The software environment is setup using modules. Depending on the user requirements, different development flows for the FPGA cards are supported.

• Xilinx Alveo U280

  • Vitis Design Flow (recommended)

  • Vivado Design Flow

• Intel Stratix 10

  • oneAPI (recommended)

  • OpenCL (recommended for projects with exisiting OpenCL code base or for usage of serial channels)

  • DSP Builder

The development (including emulation to check functional correctness, report generation to get indications of expected performance, and synthesis with bittstream generation) can be done on any Noctua 2 node. Just load the corresponding modules for the target FPGA platform and Development Tool flow.

To execute designs on actual FPGAs, the same modules are required and additionally an FPGA node needs to be allocated with a fitting constraint, to get FPGAs with the expected configuration and drivers.

The Table of FPGA Software and Firmware Stacks provides an overview of the interplay of tools, modules and constraints for the three recommended development flows. Additionally, we have created Quick Start Guides to walk you through the six steps with examples using the latest tools.

System Access to FPGA Partition

To use Noctua 2 nodes with FPGAs, along with your Slurm command, you need to select the FPGA partition and provide a constraint to specify the configuration of FPGAs (shell, driver, board support package (BSP)) that your designs have been built for.

For Xilinx Alveo U280 cards you can use

For Bittware 520n cards with Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs you can use

Constraints can be used together with srun, sbatch and salloc, however under some conditions salloc will fail, for details click the expansion box below. We recommend to always use srun or sbatch.

A list of available matching versions of the BSPs and SDKs can be found in the Software Overview Details.

FPGA-to-FPGA Networking

All FPGA boards offer direct inter-FPGA connections. The Alveo U280 boards offer two connections that can be configured for point-to-point communication or connect to an Ethernet switch. The Bittware 520N boards offer 4 point-to-point connections to other FPGA boards when configured with a fitting BSP. The topic of FPGA-to-FPGA Networking has a more detailed documentation page with various examples and a graphical input tool (see figure below).

Open

Clique topology between two FPGA nodes.

Sanity Checks and Troubleshooting

• Tool and Board Info

• Hardware Diagnose

• link to main sanity checks and troubleshooting page

Contact and Support

For problems with the FPGA infrastructure (software and/or hardware) use our main support mail address pc2-support@uni-paderborn.de.

In order to help you as quickly as possible, please follow these guidelines

• Use [Noctua2-FPGA] as a prefix in your email subject line.

• Where did the problem occur and what did you expect to happen?

• If possible, how can we reproduce the error in a systematic manner?

• Did you attempt to fix/troubleshoot the problem? If you attempted to debug the problem, provide us the steps you already took and the intermediate results.

For general questions, acceleration support or project ideas with regarding FPGAs, please reach out to the FPGA domain-expects.

Getting Started

Available FPGA Libraries and Applications

We and others have developed several ready to use libraries and applications that use FPGAs to accelerate the computation. Please use the links to get examples and the documentation. You can contact us, if you need guidance to accelerate your target code with our FPGAs libraries.

Related pages