Task-Level Parallelism for the Multifrontal Method in Tightly Coupled CPU-FPGA Architectures

The multifrontal method is an efficient direct method for solving sparse linear systems. This algorithm transforms the factorization of a large and sparse matrix into a sequence of dense matrix operations. Some of these dense operations can be accelerated with FPGAs, while others are suitable for CPUs. In this paper, we propose a tightly coupled heterogeneous domain-specific architecture (DSA) for the efficient execution of the multifrontal algorithm. This tightly coupled hardware architecture ensures low communication overhead between the CPU and FPGA. Each matrix operation is assigned to the CPU or FPGA based on its characteristics. Furthermore, we apply the task-based scheduling model for multi-core architectures to our heterogeneous DSA. Considering the difference in the storage structure of the CPU and FPGA, we modify the original task graph and propose a data-centric task graph that is more suitable for the FPGA. Based on this scheduling model, we propose two optimizations to further improve performance. Finally, we test the scheduling overhead of the system and determine the finest task granularity accordingly. We evaluate our architecture on Xilinx ZCU102. Compared to MUMPS, for a set of 5 matrices, our implementation can achieve an average of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$4.3 \times$</tex> performance improvement with just 10 % of the computing power.