Errata to ENERGETIC: Final Report

Bane, Michael ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1500-2864 and Kibats, Andrew (2023) Errata to ENERGETIC: Final Report. Research Report. Manchester Metropolitan University. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

During further work on the EXCALiBUR H&ES FPGA Testbed looking at FPGA performance it has come to light that the approach for monitoring the power of an Xilinx U280 FPGA card only looked at the PCI-express power rail and, regrettably, overlooked the AUX power rail. The only data where this is an issue in the original Final Report is regarding SGEMM energy consumption i.e. Figure 6 and its discussion. The correct methodology was applied to the U50 FPGA card (hosted at Newcastle) in all cases. We have developed and applied an alternative approach, which we have confirmed with AMD/Xilinx as to its correctness. Whilst applying this new method in order to correct FPGA energy consumption, we also examined the host CPU energy consumption. We made use of the amd_energy kernel module [1] installed so could read counters directly for FPGA energy consumption and discovered significant difference to the previously published data. Section 2 describes our approaches to measuring energy consumption of FPGA and host CPU during the execution of the SGEMM bitstream. Section 3 gives our updated results (see https://espace.mmu.ac.uk/633613/), with Figure 2 illustrating the observed differences. Section 4 discusses how this new data amends some findings with Sections 5 and 6 giving our conclusions and plans for further work.