Evaluating oneAPI I/O Pipes in a Case Study of Scaling a SYCL Jacobi Solver to multiple FPGAs

In the context of high-performance computing (HPC) for distributed workloads, individual field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) need efficient ways to exchange data, which requires network infrastructure and software abstractions. Dedicated multi-FPGA clusters provide inter-FPGA networks for direct device to device communication. The oneAPI high-level synthesis toolchain offers I/O pipes to allow user kernels to interact with the networking ports of the FPGA board. In this work, we evaluate using oneAPI I/O pipes for direct FPGA-to-FPGA communication by scaling a SYCL implementation of a Jacobi solver on up to 25 FPGAs in the Noctua 2 cluster. We see good results in weak and strong scaling experiments.