SupraSNN: Exploiting Synapse-Level Parallelism in Spiking Neural Network Accelerators through Co-Optimized Mapping and Scheduling

Seyed Sadra Ghavami, Mohammad Hossein Nikkhah, Mohammad Rasoul Roshanshah, Saeed Safari 2026-06-14

The problem is that deploying Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) on hardware is limited by the challenge of managing massive parallelism, analogous to the historical barrier of serial execution in processors. The method introduces SupraSNN, a superscalar-inspired hardware-software co-design framework that treats synaptic events as parallelizable micro-operations, using a Multi-Cast Tree, parallel Synapse Processing Units, and a Merge Tree with a unified Neuron Unit. Experimental evidence shows that on a Xilinx Zynq XC7Z020 FPGA, SupraSNN achieves 149 μs inference latency and 0.025 mJ per image for MNIST (93.44% accuracy), delivering 47.6% lower latency and 5.6× better energy efficiency than prior FPGA-based SNN accelerators. This matters because it demonstrates a practical path to high synapse-level parallelism and energy efficiency for SNN deployment, extending to recurrent SNNs on the Spiking Heidelberg Dataset.

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On the Limits of Performance Portability in Directive-Based GPU Programming

Alessandro Romeo, Nitin Shukla, Stefano Truzzi, Alessio Suriano 2026-06-14

The problem is that directive-based GPU programming faces fundamental trade-offs between performance, portability, and productivity when transitioning scientific applications to exascale systems. The method involved porting the production-grade magnetohydrodynamics code gPLUTO from OpenACC to OpenMP and evaluating its performance on NVIDIA A100 and AMD MI250X devices. Experimental evidence shows that while OpenACC and OpenMP achieve comparable performance on NVIDIA platforms, the same OpenMP implementation is approximately three times slower at the application level on AMD MI250X, with kernel-level slowdowns reaching up to 47x due to strided memory-access patterns, compiler limitations, and register pressure from C++ abstractions. This matters because it demonstrates that achieving portable performance across GPU architectures requires not only application-level changes but also continued advances in compiler backends and architecture-aware optimization strategies.

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