Acceleration of the aggregation process in a Hall-thruster simulation using Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL

The Full Particle-In-Cell (Full-PIC) method is a numerical simulation technique used in the research and development of Hall-thrusters which are a type of electric propulsion engines. It treats ions, neutrons, and electrons as particles and is highly accurate compared with other methods which treat them as a fluid. However, it requires a large computational cost. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is developing a software package called NSRU-Full-PIC that implements such a method. One of the important computing tasks in NSRU-Full-PIC is the aggregation process, which causes Read-After-write (RAW) hazards, and hence makes parallel computation difficult. In this paper, we tackle this problem by introducing a reduction operation with an FPGA accelerator. We use Intel’s mid-range SoC, Arria 10 which embeds floating-point DSPs for high performance numerical computation. Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL is available for this platform for easy offloading of complex tasks. We implemented 4 types reduction kernels and compared their performance. As a result, the aggregation process becomes 76.4 times faster than the single-thread version on an ARM Cortex-A9 1.5 GHz, and 14.1 times faster than that on a Xeon E5-2660 2.9 GHz in our fastest implementation, Read-16-Vect. In this implementation, we achieved 93.5% of theoretical performance with optimized FPGA resources.