Scalable high performance computing on FPGA clusters using message passing

The direct connection of application logic to network logic allows parallel applications to better leverage the network resources. We present a hardware description language message passing application programming interface (HDL MP API) for FPGAs. This allows an application to operate both local and network resources in a uniform, scalable and portable manner, independent of the interconnect. We use the message passing communication paradigm with all necessary communication operations performed by dedicated control hardware, independently of the interconnect. Ethernet has been used as the interconnect to demonstrate the HDL MP API functionality for this proof of concept system. Parallel linear array matrix multiplication has been implemented and tested using the HDL MP API. This application demonstrates the scalability provided by the HDL MP API.