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Examining the Viability of FPGA Supercomputing

EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems volume 2007, Article number: 093652 (2007) Cite this article

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 and Affiliations

  1. Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA, 24061, USA

    Stephen Craven & Peter Athanas

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  1. Stephen Craven
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  2. Peter Athanas
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Correspondence to Stephen Craven.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Craven, S., Athanas, P. Examining the Viability of FPGA Supercomputing. J Embedded Systems 2007, 093652 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/93652

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

Keywords

  • Comparative Analysis
  • Performance Improvement
  • Control Structure
  • Field Programmable Gate Array
  • Electronic Circuit