FPGA Hardware Acceleration of Monte Carlo Simulations for the Ising Model
A two dimensional Ising model with nearest neighbors ferromagnetic interactions is implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) board. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations were carried out using an efficient hardware representation of individual spins and a combined global local LFSR random number generator. Consistent results regarding the descriptive properties of magnetic systems, like energy, magnetization and susceptibility are obtained while a speed up factor of approximately six times is achieved in comparison to previous FPGA based published works and almost <inline formula><tex math notation="LaTeX"$10^4$/tex math><alternatives> <inline graphic xlink:type="simple" xlink:href="ortegazamorano ieq1 2505725.gif"/alternatives>/inline formula> times in comparison to a standard CPU simulation. A detailed description of the logic design used is given together with a careful analysis of the quality of the random number generator used. The obtained results confirm the potential of FPGAs for analyzing the statistical mechanics of magnetic systems.
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems