A pipelined and parallel architecture for quantum Monte Carlo simulations on FPGAs

  • Authors:

  • Akila Gothandaraman;Gregory D. Peterson;G. Lee Warren;Robert J. Hinde;Robert J. Harrison

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN and Center for Simulation and Modeling, Department of Chemistry, The University of Pittsburgh, ...;Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN;Department of Chemistry, Yeshiva University, New York, NY;Department of Chemistry, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN;Department of Chemistry, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN

  • Venue:
  • VLSI Design - Special issue on selected papers from the midwest symposium on circuits and systems
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Recent advances in Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology make reconfigurable computing using FPGAs an attractive platform for accelerating scientific applications. We develop a deeply pipelined and parallel architecture for Quantum Monte Carlo simulations using FPGAs. Quantum Monte Carlo simulations enable us to obtain the structural and energetic properties of atomic clusters. We experiment with different pipeline structures for each component of the design and develop a deeply pipelined architecture that provides the best performance in terms of achievable clock rate, while at the same time has a modest use of the FPGA resources. We discuss the details of the pipelined and generic architecture that is used to obtain the potential energy and wave function of a cluster of atoms.