Reconfigurable supercomputing

The synergistic advances in high-performance computing and reconfigurable computing, based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), has resulted in hybrid parallel systems of microprocessors and FPGAs. Such systems support both fine-grain and coarse-grain parallelism, and can dynamically tune their architecture to fit various applications. Programming these systems can be quite challenging as programming of FPGA devices can involve hardware design. This tutorial will introduce the field of reconfigurable supercomputing and its advances in systems, programming, applications and tools. Reconfigurable system developments at SRC, Cray, SGI, and Star Bridge will be highlighted, and case studies including full application developments will be presented along with the live demonstrations. This tutorial will be the first to show scalability studies for real-life applications over entire HPRC systems. This will reveal the tremendous promise held by this class of architectures in performance, power and cost improvements. Challenges that remain will be also discussed.