Implementation of the two-point angular correlation function on a high-performance reconfigurable computer

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kindratenko, Volodymyr V.^; | Myers, Adam D.^; | Brunner, Robert J.^;

Affiliations: National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA | Department of Astronomy, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA

Note: [] Corresponding author: Volodymyr V. Kindratenko, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, USA. Tel.: +1 217 265 0209; Fax: +1 217 244 1987; E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: We present a parallel implementation of an algorithm for calculating the two-point angular correlation function as applied in the field of computational cosmology. The algorithm has been specifically developed for a reconfigurable computer. Our implementation utilizes a microprocessor and two reconfigurable processors on a dual-MAP SRC-6 system. The two reconfigurable processors are used as two application-specific co-processors. Two independent computational kernels are simultaneously executed on the reconfigurable processors while data pre-fetching from disk and initial data pre-processing are executed on the microprocessor. The overall end-to-end algorithm execution speedup achieved by this implementation is over 90× as compared to a sequential implementation of the algorithm executed on a single 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon microprocessor.

Keywords: Reconfigurable computing, angular correlation function

DOI: 10.3233/SPR-2009-0286

Journal: Scientific Programming, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 247-259, 2009