Contest Judging

Owned by 👋 Supranational
Last updated: Sept 18, 2019
2 min read

The contest will be run as winner take all as measured by the lowest latency per squaring over 1B repeated squarings on AWS F1.

The baseline latency for Round 1 will be set at 50ns per squaring. The winner of Round 1 will receive $3000/ns improvement from the baseline.

The baseline for Round 2 will be set based on the results of Round 1.

See the Competition Official Rules and Disclosures for more information.

Qualification Requirements

Entries must meet the following requirements to qualify to win:

  • All collateral contained in a GitHub repository, shared with contest operator (Supranational), including everything needed to run your model. All commits should include a 'sign off' message. This can be done by adding '-s' or '–signoff' to your git commit commands indicating you agree to the Developer Certificate of Origin. This may include:
    • Code - RTL, software, scripts
    • Documentation
    • Constraint files
    • TCL scripts
    • Makefiles
  • Reasonable documentation of the design, including
    • High level algorithm - include architectural drawings, formulas, pseudo-code, models (python, etc.)
    • Key implementation details
    • Detailed instructions to reproduce all inputs and results
  • Conforms to the specified modular squaring interface
  • Simulates successfully with the provided modulus
    • Vivado behavioral simulation to 10k iterations
    • SDAccel hardware emulation passes to 10 iterations
  • Synthesizes and Implements successfully in AWF F1 SDAccel flow
  • Executes and produces the correct result on AWS F1 FPGA hardware for 1B iterations using a random input
  • Complies with AWS F1 usage agreements
  • Complies with this contest official rules (Competition Official Rules and Disclosures)

Performance Evaluation

  1. Estimate performance for all qualifying designs using the SDAccel synthesis clock freq and simulation cycles/sq. For example, given 8 cycles/sq and 161Mhz, total latency is (1/161)*1000*8 = 49.7ns.
  2. Select the design with the highest estimated performance as well as any designs within 3ns of that result.
  3. Execute these designs on AWS F1. Measure performance and functional correctness of 1B repeated squarings. Contestants should be aware that only certain clock frequencies available natively from AWS F1, as documented in: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga/blob/master/hdk/docs/dynamic_clock_config.md. Designs may use an MMCM or clock generator to operate at alternate frequencies.
  4. The winner will be the design with the lowest latency per squaring over 1B iterations as measured by the RTL kernel driver (https://github.com/supranational/vdf-fpga/blob/rc1/msu/sw/main.cpp). The expected command line is:
       host -i 1 -f 1073741824 -n 1024 -s 0x<random input to be revealed>