fpga-accelerator.md

FPGA-accelerated backend

Introduction

dcurl allows FPGA accelerated PoW for radical performance improvements. With FPGA accelerations, PoW takes 0.14 second in average for MWM=14 and 0.42 second in average for MWM=15. Both Arrow Sockit board and Intel FPGA DE10-Nano board are known to work with FPGA accelerator.

Features

The backend were extending fundamental work done by Lampa Lab as following:

• Use Verilog to implement Curl & PoW accelerators;
• Use System Verilog and UVM to verify the accelerators;
• Synthesize Curl & POW hardware accelerators for Intel FPGA DE10-Nano board and validate;
• Write dedicated Linux driver for hardware-accelerated PoW; More information: LampaLab/iota_fpga

The further work in addition to Lampa Lab done by dcurl developers:

• Resynthesize the POW hardware accelerator for Arrow Sockit board and validate;
• Adapt the PoW hardware accelerator into dcurl backend interface;

Limitations

• Only one thread is allowed to do FPGA PoW
• No multi-thread management inside the FPGA Implementation Context is implemented