EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems Cover Image
Research Article
Open Access

Examining the Viability of FPGA Supercomputing

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems20072007:093652

https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/93652

©  S. Craven and P. Athanas. 2007

Received: 16 May 2006

Accepted: 16 November 2006

Published: 10 January 2007

Abstract

For certain applications, custom computational hardware created using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can produce significant performance improvements over processors, leading some in academia and industry to call for the inclusion of FPGAs in supercomputing clusters. This paper presents a comparative analysis of FPGAs and traditional processors, focusing on floating-point performance and procurement costs, revealing economic hurdles in the adoption of FPGAs for general high-performance computing (HPC).

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Authors’ Affiliations

(1)
Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

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Copyright

© S. Craven and P. Athanas. 2007

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.