VINEYARD, a three-year research project funded by the EC under Horizon2020 program, finished on January 2019. The VINEYARD express goal was to develop energy-efficient, accelerator-based servers and technology for enabling the efficient, seamless integration of hardware acceleration in the data center. The deployment of energy-efficient hardware accelerators was used to improve significantly the performance of Cloud-computing applications and reduce the energy consumption in data centers. In the years that passed since project start, the VINEYARD vision has seen its realization as the deployment of hardware accelerators in the Cloud: In 2017, hyperscalers like Amazon, Huawei, Alibaba and Baidu offered FPGA resources to their Cloud users.
VINEYARD developed novel energy-efficient platforms by integrating two types of hardware accelerator: A new-generation dataflow-based accelerator and a novel architecture for FPGA-based (control-flow) accelerators. The dataflow engines (DFEs) are suitable for high-performance computing (HPC) applications that can be effectively represented with dataflow graphs while the latter are used for accelerating applications that need tight communication between the processor and the hardware accelerator(s).
On the technology front, during the VINEYARD project, Maxeler developed the next generation of DFEs featuring a novel, high-performance architecture. The new MAX5 achieves 3x higher compute performance and 2x lower energy than previous-generation DFEs. Also, the MAX5 is fully compatible for deployment in the Cloud (e.g. compatible with Amazon AWS F1 instances).
At the same time, Bull developed many prototypes of discrete/integrated FPGA-accelerated server based on Intel’s Skylake/CascadeLake CPUs and Arria10/Stratix10 FPGAs. The transformation of one of these prototypes into a commercial product is planned for 2019. Such product will offer a low-latency communication interface between the CPUs and accelerators and will intend to evolve towards an extension of computation nodes within HPC systems.
VINEYARD developed also a high-level programming framework that allows the seamless integration of heterogeneous hardware accelerators (e.g. CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, DFEs) in modern data centers. The VINEYARD framework allows end-users to seamlessly utilize these accelerators in heterogeneous computing systems by using typical cluster frameworks (i.e. Spark). The chief breakthrough of the VINEYARD framework lies in the ability to hide from the users the programming complexity of the heterogeneous computing system and allow them to focus on application coding.
A central repository called AccelStore (www.accel-store.com) has been created that is used to host hardware-accelerator IP for use in heterogeneous computing systems. The community can upload their individual hardware-accelerator IP in AccelStore which can, in the future, be used to brokerage the licensed use of such IP by 3rd parties.
The project has developed a comprehensive VINEYARD accelerator suite, a collection of hardware accelerators in the form of IP cores that is used to evaluate the VINEYARD framework on real use-case applications.
Specifically, VINEYARD extended its original list of targeted applications and, by project conclusion, developed the following extended list of heterogeneous-accelerator IPs:
• Neurocomputing applications:
• Financial applications
• Data analytics
• Machine learning
VINEYARD dissemination and communication activities:
o 21 peer-reviewed conference papers
o 3 peer-reviewed journal papers (accepted in Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems)
o 4 co-organized workshop with other EU projects (HiPEAC CSW, Samos)
o 4 newsletters
