Chips & System Integration

Without disclosing confidential information, discussing how to understand custom chip architecture and integrate CFD / CAE solvers with custom chips and system platforms for hardware-software co-design.

1. Chip Architecture Understanding

Understanding computational units, memory hierarchy, and bandwidth characteristics is fundamental to hardware-software co-design.

• 1.1 Compute Arrays & Cores Organization of compute units, peak performance, instruction set characteristics. Operator types suitable for different compute units (matrix-vector, multiple RHS, multigrid, etc.).
• 1.2 Memory Hierarchy On-chip cache, off-chip memory, bandwidth and latency characteristics. How to match memory hierarchy through data layout and access patterns.
• 1.3 Communication & Interconnect On-chip communication, multi-chip interconnect, interfaces with CPU. Impact of communication overhead on algorithm design.
• 1.4 Power & Thermal Management Power characteristics, thermal design, performance-power trade-offs. Balancing performance and energy efficiency in engineering applications.

2. Operator Mapping

Not all operators are suitable for chip deployment. Need to identify which operators gain significant acceleration and which should remain on CPU.

• 2.1 Matrix Operations Sparse matrix-vector multiply, matrix-matrix operations, their mapping to chip compute units.
• 2.2 Data Layout How to organize data to match chip memory hierarchy, minimizing data movement.
• 2.3 Hybrid Execution Partitioning workloads between CPU and chip, coordinating execution.

3. System Integration

• 3.1 Driver & API Design How solvers interface with chip drivers, API design for transparency.
• 3.2 Performance Optimization Identifying bottlenecks, optimizing data transfer and computation overlap.
• 3.3 Validation & Verification Ensuring numerical correctness and reproducibility across platforms.

4. My Practice

Currently working on:

• Mapping CFD sparse linear system solvers to custom chips.
• Optimizing memory access patterns for chip architectures.
• Hardware-software co-design for maximum performance while maintaining numerical accuracy.

Specific implementation details and performance analysis will be documented in projects and technical notes.