Event: FPGA Conference 2022
Date of presentation: 5 July 2022, 11:15
Audience: ~25
ARUZ, Polish abbreviation of “Analyzer of Real Complex Systems”, is a multi-purpose FPGA-based machine initially built for speeding up molecular chemistry simulations, which find use in several fields like pharmacy, chemical industry, material engineering, etc. For those, an impressive speed-up of up to 3 orders of magnitude has been achieved, when compared with an Intel i7 PC running an equivalent simulation.
ARUZ is a 450kW, water-cooled system, which consists of 24,000 FPGAs, 3,000 SoCs, 75,000 cables, 1,200 power supply units, 22 supervising and controlling servers, and one huge UPS.
The FPGA configuration is determined by a selection of one of the pre-prepared bitstream sets. Each set delivers a specific range of chemical mechanisms, which affect the simulation space — specific number of simulated molecules inside one FPGA — and speed. The machine was scaled to deliver a simulation space with at least 1.3 million molecules; however, thanks to those simulation variants, the simplest simulation can deliver over 5 million molecules.
How to approach FPGA firmware generation and verification? How to simplify challenges using automatic code generation and a preprocessor? How to test a system with hundreds of configurations? What needs to be done to develop and deliver a highly complex system in just 13 months? How to debug a system with 27,000 FPGAs?
These and many more questions will be answered through the technical journey of its construction, which can be a good example of how to run an FPGA-oriented project when time is short, budget is very limited, resources are scarce, and a high-quality end product is required.
