Tomorrow, my PhD student Nadesh Ramanathan gives his first conference presentation, at the ACM International Symposium on FPGAs, claiming a place for work-stealing on FPGAs (joint work with John Wickerson and Felix Winterstein). The short paper on which the presentation is based can be found here.
Nadesh argues that we should pursue lock free approaches to load balancing for FPGAs, and shows that this can be implemented within Altera’s OpenCL framework. Initial work from an efficient K-means clustering algorithm which manipulates dynamic data structures demonstrates that this approach shows promise for the future. As we move to put more and more irregular applications on FPGAs, this kind of methodology will become increasingly important.
Thinking 