HAMP: A Hardware Accelerator Multi-Platform Benchmark for High Performance Heterogeneous Computing

Abstract

This paper introduces a Hardware Accelerator Multi-Platform Benchmark for high performance heterogeneous computing called HAMP, a multi-platform tool designed to analyze the performance of hardware accelerators such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. HAMP benchmark stands out for its ability to evaluate different hardware architectures within a unified environment using a common programming language, C++ with the OpenCL framework. The multi-platform tool integrates a selection of state-of-the-art kernels for the evaluation of hardware characteristics and arithmetic operations, employing two performance metrics (speed and bandwidth).  Developed in Python, a graphical user interface (GUI) simplifies interaction with the tool, allowing users to configure and execute kernels on the hardware accelerator without needing technical knowledge. Experiments were performed on three hardware accelerators with the five kernels comprising the HAMP benchmark. The results obtained indicate that HAMP is an efficient and reliable multi-platform tool, facilitating the comparison of diverse hardware architectures within a unified design environment, a capability not previously available in the state-of-the-art.