Computation of the 9th Dedekind Number using FPGA Supercomputing

Patrick De Causmaeker and Lennart Van Hirtum present an in-depth seminar on their moonshot project to compute the 9th Dedekind number using a combination of algorithmic improvements and highly customized hardware accelerators implemented with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Together with their collaborators, they succeeded in computing the 9th Dedekind number on March 8, 2023, after several months of computing on the Noctua 2 supercomputer at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing. In this seminar, Patrick De Causemaeker will introduce the Dedekind number problem and give a historical perspective on the algorithmic developments that have made it possible to advance the state of the art in computing Dedekind numbers. Lennart Van Hirtum tells how he joined the effort to compute the 9th Dedekind number as a master’s project at KU Leuven, and how he was so captivated by the topic that he continued working on it for 3 years before finally completing the computation. He discusses the connection between the graph-theoretic and algorithmic representation of the problem and the hardware architecture to achieve orders of magnitude speedups over CPUs using FPGA-based hardware accelerators, which were key to tackling the massive computational challenge. Reference: A computation of D(9) using FPGA Supercomputing Lennart Van Hirtum, Patrick De Causmaecker, Jens Goemaere, Tobias Kenter, Heinrich Riebler, Michael Lass, Christian Plessl preprint: (to be presented at 8th International Workshop on Boolean Functions and their Applications (BFA’23) in Voss, Norway in September 2023.)