The overall goal of this thesis is to evaluate the feasibility of FPGA based computer
system in HPC. This works is performed within ExaNeSt, an EU funded project
which aims to develop and prototype energy effcient solutions for the production
of exascale-level supercomputers.
As the matter of fact, the current computer architectures need to be re-thought
in order to reach the exascale performance. Scale current technologies will make
the power consumption so large, that to run and maintain such systems will be
technologically and economically too much demanding.
Let's take for example the system TSUBAME3.0, the #1 in the Green500 list
of June 2017, which has an energy effciency of 14.11 GFLOPS/Watt. If we assume
to be able to scale this system without loss of effciency to reach 1 exaFLOPS, the
resulting system will have a power consumption of 70.9 MW, 500 times more than
the actual power (142 kW).
This makes clear that the power consumption issues demands the study of a
new class of HPC systems based on energy effcient solutions.
