Intel FPGA^® OpenCL™ Design Example

OPRA FAST Parser

This example is a OPRA Fast parser kernel. It demonstrates:

• Altera's OpenCL Channels vendor extension
• Low-latency streaming application where data is read from a data stream encoded in the OPRA FAST message encoding format: www.opradata.com The encoded data is streamed in, decompressed, then sent back to the host.

The kernel parses incoming compressed OPRA Fast data from a UDP offload engine, and returns a subset of fields over ethernet with the UDP offload engine. An initial run is performed by reading and writing to memory for reference. The host program forks into two processes, which allows the host to send and receive data over UDP independently, and saturate the 10G link. See the included presentation for more information.

Notes

1. This example design requires a BSP that conforms the specifications of the Network Reference Platform. In particular, the BSP must expose a UDP input and output I/O channel with the interface of the PLDA quick user dataprogram protocol (QuickUDP) intellectual property (IP) core.
2. In order to achieve 10G speeds, special hardware needs to be used in the host PC. The following hardware combination has been tested to run at 10G speeds:
   • Solarflare SFN5122F Ethernet Card
   • 2x Avago AFBR-709SMZ Transceivers
   • Mellanox MAM1Q00A-QSA Adaptors
   • Addon add-lc-lc-15m5om3 fiber optic cable

Additional Documentation

The top-level OpenCL kernel file is device/opra_fast_parser.cl.

To compile the OpenCL kernel, run:

where <board> matches the board you want to target. The -o bin/opra_fast_parser.aocx argument is used to place the compiled binary in the location that the host program expects.

If you are unsure of the boards available, use the following command to list available boards:

To compile the host program, run:

The compiled host program will be located at bin/host.

Before running the host program, you should have compiled the OpenCL kernel and the host program. Refer to the above sections if you have not completed those steps.

To fully utilize the example design to demonstrate 10G link saturation, the special networking hardware described in the Requirements section needs to be installed and configured:

1. Install the Solarflare NIC in the PC as documented by the vendor. Make sure the the card is installed in a PCIe slot capable of Gen2x8.
2. Insert the Mellanox MAM1Q00A-QSA Adaptor into the first QSFP slot of the board. Connect the Avago AFBR-709SMZ Transceivers to the fibre optic cable, and use it to connect one end to the NIC SFP port to the FPGA.
3. The UDP offload engine is configured with the IP 192.168.7.4, and sends to the IP 192.168.7.43 on the host PC.

To generate packets at 10G speeds, this demo relies on the Solarflare OpenOnload driver to accelerate transfers from the host. The OpenOnload driver can be found at http://www.openonload.org/.

The script bin/config.sh can be used to setup the correct IP addresses and configure the OpenOnload driver, but may need to be modified to configure the correct Ethernet interface. Replace eth2 in the script with the name of the Ethernet interface connected to the FPGA accelerator card.

To run the host program on hardware, execute:

By default, the host program will use UDP for kernel input and output. To fully saturate the 10G link, the onload driver is used and an environment variable to set a buffer size is needed.

Copyright (C) 2013-2016 Altera Corporation, San Jose, California, USA. All rights reserved.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this
software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software
without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge,
publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to
whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or
substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT
HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING
FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR
OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

This agreement shall be governed in all respects by the laws of the State of California and
by the laws of the United States of America.