Direct GPU/FPGA Communication Via PCI Express

UCAA 2012: 1st International Workshop on Unconventional Cluster Architectures and Applications |

Parallel processing has hit mainstream computing in the form of CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. While explorations proceed with all three platforms individually and with the CPU-GPU pair, little exploration has been performed with the synergy of GPU-FPGA. This is due in part to the cumbersome nature of communication between the two. This paper presents a mechanism for direct GPU-FPGA communication and characterizes its performance in a full hardware implementation.