FPGAs in HPC LDRD Report

2006-11-01 Wed
fpga pub

We published an unclassified unlimited release (UUR) technical report summarizing our LDRD work investigating how FPGAs could be leveraged as computational accelerators in HPC platforms.

Abstract

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been used as alternative computational devices for over a decade; however, they have not been used for traditional scientific computing due to their perceived lack of floating-point performance. In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in alternatives to traditional microprocessors for high performance computing. Sandia National Labs began two projects to determine whether FPGAs would be a suitable alternative to microprocessors for high performance scientific computing and, if so, how they should be integrated into the system. We present results that indicate that FPGAs could have a significant impact on future systems. FPGAs have the potential to have order of magnitude levels of performance wins on several key algorithms; however, there are serious questions as to whether the system integration challenge can be met. Furthermore, there remain challenges in FPGA programming and system level reliability when using FPGA devices.

Publications