High-Performance Sparse Linear Algebra on HBM-Equipped FPGAs Using HLS: A Case Study on SpMV (HiSparse)

Note: if you are using a newer version of Vitis, which operates on a U280 shell version other than xilinx_u280_xdma_201920_3, please refer to the 2021+ branch for running the design.

HiSparse is a high-performance accelerator for sparse-matrix vcetor multiplication (SpMV). Implemented on a multi-die HBM-equipped FPGA device, HiSparse achieves 237MHz and delivers promising speedup with increased bandwidth efficiency when compared to prior arts on CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs.

For more information, please refer to our FPGA 2022 paper.

@article{du2022hisparse,
  title={{High-Performance Sparse Linear Algebra on HBM-Equipped FPGAs Using HLS: A Case Study on SpMV}},
  author={Du, Yixiao and Hu, Yuwei and Zhou, Zhongchun and Zhang, Zhiru},
  journal={{Int'l Symp. on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)}},
  year={2022}
}

Prerequisites

• Platform: Xilinx Alveo U280
• Toolchain: Xilinx Vitis 2020.2

To reproduce the results

1. Colne this repo and download the datasets

git clone https://github.com/cornell-zhang/HiSparse.git
cd datasets
source download.sh

You will find two directories: graph and pruned_nn containing the datasets used in our evaluation.

2. Install cnpy to load the datasets

Cnpy is a C++ library that enables reading .npy files in C++. It is open-sourced available here: https://github.com/rogersce/cnpy. Please follow the instructions in the cnpy repo to install it.

After installing cnpy, remember to setup the following variables to load this library:

export CNPY_INCLUDE=<the directory contains cnpy header (cnpy.h)>
export CNPY_LIB=<the directory contains cnpy library (libcnpy.so)>
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$CNPY_LIB

3. Set up Xilinx Vitis 2020.2

This step is defferent depending on the installation setup on your machine. However, to check whether you have correctly set it up, you can do

printenv VITIS

the path to the Vitis installation should appear if it's correctly set up.

4. Run the pre-complied bitstream

This repo has a pre-complied fixed-point bitstream: dempo_spmv.xclbin. You can directly run it using

cd sw
make demo

The benchmark results will be printed out as the program is running, in the format as:

{Preprocessing: 0.64566 s | SpMV: 0.77102 ms | 49.4087 GBPS | 12.9698 GOPS }

The numbers are: pre-processing time, SpMV run time, SpMV data throughput, SpMV operation throughput.

Note: data throughput = operation throughput / 2 * 8.

5. Build and run the design

cd sw
make benchmark IMPL=<fixed/float_pob/float_stall>

The IMPL option is used to switch between the fixed-point design, the floating-point deisgn using partial output buffers, and the floating-point design using stall + row interleaving.