OpenCL support for Enzian

Abstract

Recently, there has been growing interest in custom and reconfigurable hardware. However, commercial hardware platforms have limitations for research, because they are optimized for specific use-cases or have proprietary parts. To address this problem, the Systems Group at ETH built Enzian, a new computing platform tailored for research and for exploring novel hardware/software co-designs. However, there is a lack of existing use cases that could promote Enzian as a viable research platform. In addition, Enzian, like most CPU-FPGA hybrid systems, is hard to use for computer scientists without a hardware development background. In this thesis, we add OpenCL support to Enzian, which not only represents a real-world use case but also increases the usability of the platform. Using the flexibility of the Enzian computing platform, we explore different designs and compare their performance with existing systems. Our preliminary experimental results show that Enzian can support key features of existing OpenCL implementations. Because of OpenCL, we were able to port existing applications to Enzian with little effort. Hence, OpenCL improves the usability of Enzian and serves as a good use case to prove the feasibility of the platform. To summarize, Enzian proved to be a viable platform for computer systems research and will hopefully support researchers in developing innovative hardware solutions.