A custom processor for a TDMA solver in a CFD application

Abstract

This paper presents a custom processor designed to execute a time consuming function in a CFD application. The selected function implements the method TDMA (Tri-Diagonal Matrix Algorithm) for solving a tri-diagonal system of equations. The custom processor was implemented in a commercial PCI prototyping board based on Virtex4LX FPGAs and uses a dedicated memory cache system, address generators and a deep pipelined floating-point datapath. Running at 100MHz and assuming the input data already in the cache memories, the system reaches a throughput greater than 1.4GFLOPS. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.