Cube: A 512-FPGA cluster
Oskar Mencer, Kuen Hung Tsoi, Stephen Craimer, Tim Todman, Wayne W. Luk, Ming-Yee Wong, Philip H. W. Leong · 2009
Cube, a massively-parallel FPGA-based platform is presented. The machine is made from boards each containing 64 FPGA devices and eight boards can be connected in a cube structure for a total of 512 FPGA devices. With high bandwidth systolic inter-FPGA communication and a flexible programming scheme, the result is a low power, high density and scalable supercomputing machine suitable for various large scale parallel applications. A RC4 key search engine was built as an demonstration application. In a fully implemented Cube, the engine can perform a full search on the 40-bit key space within 3 minutes, this being 359 times faster than a multi-threaded software implementation running on a 2.5 GHz Intel Quad-Core Xeon processor.