The 3D FFT is critical in many physical simulations and image processing applications. On FPGAs, however, the 3D FFT was thought to be inefficient relative to other methods such as convolution-based implementations of multigrid. We find the opposite: a simple design, operating at a conservative frequency, takes 4a#x039C;s for 163, 21a#x039C;s for 323, and 215a#x039C;s for 643 single precision data points. The first two of these compare favorably with the 25a#x039C;s and 29a#x039C;s obtained running on a current Nvidia GPU. Some broader significance is that this is a critical piece in implementing a large scale FPGA-based MD engine: even a single FPGA is capable of keeping the FFT off of the critical path for a large fraction of possible MD simulations.
['Benjamin Humphries', 'H. Zhang', 'Jiayi Sheng', 'Raphael Landaverde', 'Martin C. Herbordt']
3D FFTs on a Single FPGA