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I was wondering if folks use VHDL/FPGAs in scientific computing.

An example scenario that I was thinking off was say:

  1. Construct an arbitrary precision floating point adder
  2. Configure an FPGA board to then add such numbers

So I was looking for references (example code) where VHDL/FPGAs have been used in scientific computing.

Thanks in advance.

user1172468
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    Your question might better be directed towards Google. Here is a report on a project to build an FPGA-based supercomputer: http://www.fhpca.org/download/RSSI07-Maxwell.pdf which might get you started on your researches. – High Performance Mark Nov 13 '12 at 12:27
  • Thanks for the reference @HighPerformanceMark, I think someone passed that reference to me on another question a couple of days ago. I was looking for more vocational level material that illustrates specific solutions used for Scientific Computing. – user1172468 Nov 13 '12 at 12:30
  • FPGAs used to drive the largest astrophysics simulations in the past but is now being outplaced by GPGPU computing. – Hristo Iliev Nov 14 '12 at 10:23
  • @HristoIliev, Do you have a reference or an explanation on why that happened. I was actually thinking the flow of things would be the other way. – user1172468 Nov 14 '12 at 23:27
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    You might find [this article](http://www.ari.uni-heidelberg.de/mitarbeiter/spurzem/isc09paper.pdf) quite informative. It is somewhat old, but the leading author recently gave a talk here and showed the audience quite similar (if not the same) figures, so things haven't changed much since the time the article was published. I would say that migration to GPUs is driven mainly by the better price/performance ratio and next by the easier programming model. – Hristo Iliev Nov 15 '12 at 08:23

2 Answers2

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There are several vendors who build heterogeneous computing systems using FPGAs. I doubt you'll find complete source code for such systems.

SRC Computing

Convey Computer

Mitrionics. A reseller of other systems.

Novo-G. An academic project.

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Look into radio astronomy. With arrays such as the VLA and ALMA, the massively parallel correlator is the part that could be considered most important. These typically use FPGAs but could use custom-designed chips for extreme performance at higher cost.

Some fine reading: https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/cdl/digital-signal-processing http://web.njit.edu/~gary/728/Lecture8.html

DarenW
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