FPGA?

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) is becoming the buzz word in High Performance Computing. }:) 30x speed up results are commonly reported for various applications. Progeniq reported significant speed up on ClustalW software, a Bioinformatics application. :o

But, can you imagine using logic gates to perform tasks in a typical C program? Of course a C-to-FPGA compiler (e.g. Handel-C, Impulse C, SystemC) solves the problem. But, using FPGA does not automatically guarantee good speed up. The amount of logic gates, and the longest path in the logic gates must be minimized. These minimizations are difficult for the compiler. Hence, some efforts are required to help the compiler to achieve good performance.

The key for FPGA to success:

1. Quick conversions of existing programs for wide user coverage.
2. High performance, significantly faster than general purpose processors.
3. Portable performance to various FPGA chips.
4. Cheap is good.