Innovative technologies I---Using FPGAs in supercomputers
Stefan Möhl · 2006
FPGAs have recently emerged as a computational device for general purpose computing with extremely high performance. An FPGA is essentially an empty silicon surface that can be loaded with any circuit design. However, to create a circuit design for an algorithm requires the skills of a hardware designer. Therefore FPGAs are reputed to be hard to use.The advent of supercomputers from Cray and SGI equipped with FPGAs has given rise to the emerging field of Reconfigurable Supercomputing. Here, the focus is methods for algorithm development in FPGAs, rather than machine architecture. Within this field, three new directions have evolved: Library development, Behavioral Synthesis and Reconfigurable Processor Architectures.The Mitrion Virtual Processor is a massively parallel, reconfigurable soft-core processor for FPGAs. It is 10-30 times faster than traditional processors. With a Mitrion processor in the FPGA, it becomes possible to program the processor, rather than manually design circuits.