Scientific Computing on FPGA

Hi,
Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
experience).
I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
special
purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
experience
with this?

lancepickens@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
> experience).
> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
> special
> purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
> experience
> with this?

Yes.

Tommy

lancepickens@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
> experience).
> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
> special
> purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
> experience
> with this?

Bioinformatics, specifically Timelogic used FPGAs in the DeCypher
engine many years ago, Timelogic recently changed hands.

Also recently we saw product introductions from two vendors for Opteron
coprocessors for the 2nd socket using Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, no doubt
these will be used to hardwire some interesting algorithms. Also Cray
computer bought out a small Opteron server company (Octiga Bay) with
FPGAs on board rather than in the socket.

We had Mersenne primes on FPGA v highend PCs, FPGAs don't always win on
cost, usually a matter of managing bandwidth, FPGAs sometimes better,
sometimes not.

For the hardware shy, there are quite a few C based products to map
software to hardware, even Fortran has been used (I'm told).

Google  fpga with any scientific term and see what pops up.

John Jakson

"Tommy Thorn" <tommy.thorn@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1162518836.420552.259710@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> lancepickens@gmail.com wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
>> experience).
>> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
>> special
>> purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
>> experience
>> with this?
>
> Yes.
>
> Tommy
>

:-)

Google this.

fpga scientific computing

Guess what? Nearly half a million hits! So, I added 'lumberjack' to the 
search and got it down to 44 hits.
HTH, Syms.

Everything what can parallelize is possibly running faster in Hardware
than in Software.


lancepickens@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi,
> Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
> experience).
> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
> special
> purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
> experience
> with this?

"Symon" <symon_brewer@hotmail.com> wrote in message 
news:454aa716$1_3@x-privat.org...
> "Tommy Thorn" <tommy.thorn@gmail.com> wrote in message 
> news:1162518836.420552.259710@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>> lancepickens@gmail.com wrote:
>>> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
>>> special purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any 
>>> experience with this?
>> Yes.
>
> :-)
>
> Google this.
>
> fpga scientific computing
>
> Guess what? Nearly half a million hits! So, I added 'lumberjack' to the 
> search and got it down to 44 hits.

Very good.

Here are some other useful qualifiers and their respective scores:

FPGA scientific computing mongoose            49
FPGA scientific computing pokemon            142
FPGA scientific computing stradivarius         9
FPGA scientific computing zoroastrianism  95,600
FPGA scientific computing paragliding        936
FPGA scientific computing OMG ponies          15
FPGA scientific computing Kellogg's          285
FPGA scientific computing jello           16,200
FPGA scientific computing sefirot              1

FPGA scientific computing boring         103,000
FPGA scientific computing interesting    231,000

Hope that helps,

         -Ben- 

helmut.leonhardt@gmail.com wrote:
>Everything what can parallelize is possibly running faster in Hardware
>than in Software.

And pipelined.

On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 09:35:26 -0000, "Ben Jones" <ben.jones@xilinx.com>
wrote:

>FPGA scientific computing sefirot              1

A Googlewhackblat! But, you wrecked it. There'll be 2 hits now.

We have a reason number of customers playing with FPGAs on development 
boards as scientific and maths co-processors. It is happening in a 
surprising number of applications and markets.

John Adair
Enterpoint Ltd. - Home of Broaddown4. The Ultimate Virtex-4 Development 
Board.
http://www.enterpoint.co.uk

<lancepickens@gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1162518049.124275.221090@k70g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi,
> Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
> experience).
> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
> special
> purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
> experience
> with this?
> 

lancepickens@gmail.com wrote:

> Coming from a scientific computing standpoint (with no hardware
> experience).
> I was wondering if you can improve any dedicated tasks by designing a
> special
> purpose chips ala FPGA to run your code? Does anyone have any
> experience
> with this?

I think an interesting application are neural networks:

http://www.google.com/search?q=neural+network+fpga

The speedup compared to normal CPUs should be very high: If you synthize a
small network with e.g. 1,000 interconnections on the FPGA, a FPGA clocked
with 100 MHz would process the neural network as fast as a normal CPU
clocked with over 100 GHz.

-- 
Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de