Applying the Stream-Based Computing Model to Design Hardware Accelerators: A Case Study

To facilitate the design of hardware accelerators we propose in this paper the adoption of the stream-based computing model and the usage of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as prototyping platforms. This model exposes the maximum data parallelism available in the applications and decouples computation from memory accesses. The design and implementation procedures, including the programming of GPUs, are illustrated with the widely used MrBayes bioinformatics application. Experimental results show that a straightforward mapping of the stream-based program for the GPU into hardware structures leads to improvements in performance, scalability and cost. Moreover, it is shown that a set of simple optimization techniques can be applied in order to reduce the cost, and the power consumption of hardware solutions.