Identify Acceleration Potential - 2022.2 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-12-07
Version
2022.2 English

A function that is a bottleneck in the software application does not necessarily have the potential to run faster in a device. A detailed analysis is usually required to accurately determine the real acceleration potential of a given function. However, some simple guidelines can be used to assess if a function has potential for hardware acceleration:

  • What is the computational complexity of the function?

    Computational complexity is the number of basic computing operations required to execute the function. In programmable devices, acceleration is achieved by creating highly parallel and deeply pipelined data paths. These would be the assembly lines in the earlier analogy. The longer the assembly line and the more stations it has, the more efficient it is compared to a worker taking sequential steps in his workshop.

    Good candidates for acceleration are functions where a deep sequence of operations needs to be performed on each input sample to produce an output sample.

  • What is the computational intensity of the function?

    Computational intensity of a function is the ratio of the total number of operations to the total amount of input and output data. Functions with a high computational intensity are better candidates for acceleration because the overhead of moving data to the accelerator is comparatively lower.

  • What is the data access locality profile of the function?

    The concepts of data reuse, spatial locality, and temporal locality are useful to assess how much overhead of moving data to the accelerator can be optimized. Spatial locality reflects the average distance between several consecutive memory access operations. Temporal locality reflects the average number of access operations for an address in memory during program execution. The lower these measures the better, because it makes data more easily cacheable in the accelerator, reducing the need to expensive and potentially redundant accesses to global memory.

  • How does the throughput of the function compare to the maximum achievable in a device?

    Device-accelerated applications are distributed, multi-process systems. The throughput of the overall application does not exceed the throughput of its slowest function. The nature of this bottleneck is application specific and can come from any aspect of the system: I/O, computation or data movement. The developer can determine the maximum acceleration potential by dividing the throughput of the slowest function by the throughput of the selected function.

    Maximum Acceleration Potential = TMin / TSW

    On Alveo Data Center accelerator cards, the PCIe bus imposes a throughput limit on data transfers. While it may not be the actual bottleneck of the application, it constitutes a possible upper bound and can therefore be used for early estimates. For example, considering a PCIe throughput of 10 GB/s and a software throughput of 50 MB/s, the maximum acceleration factor for this function is 200x.

These four criteria are not guarantees of acceleration, but they are reliable tools to identify the right functions to accelerate on a device.