Virtual Prototyping Day Presentation: Design Space Exploration of Infrastructure Processing Units

On May 11th we had our 2022 Virtual Prototyping Day, with 8 great presentations from industry experts. One of the highlights was the talk from Vikrant Kapila, Lead Performance Architect in Intel's Data Centre & AI Group.

Vikrant talks about

• the design challenges of building disaggregated heterogeneous architecture that meet performance and flexibility requirements of data center operators
• how his team has built a design space exploration solution for analyzing and optimizing data center workloads on the next generation of multi-SoC system architectures
• a detailed performance analysis example, going from high-level KPI analysis, identifying problem cases, and resolving them with detailed root-cause analysis

Here is the full abstract:

FPGA-based SmartNICs offer heterogeneous architectures with numerous hardened blocks, such as accelerators identical to custom ASICs, along with a configurable FPGA die. The architecture challenge is that Intel has no insights on different data flows that customers map to the FPGA. Also, customers have concerns about Intel missing on required performance for hardened functionality in the ASIC.

In this presentation we demonstrate a novel approach for early performance design space exploration based on Synopsys Platform Architect. Using a flexible library of Lego-like building blocks, this empowers users to study data center system flows up to 6 months ahead of RTL availability, without the pre-requisite of implementing RTL logic, to be mapped to the FPGA portion of the SmartNIC solution.

The 2022 Virtual Prototyping Day presentations will be archived for 2 years, you can watch them any time by registering here: https://readytalk.webcasts.com/starthere.jsp?ei=1533105