FPGA UK
New Scientist reports on an FPGA-based supercomputer being built at the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. The designers say it will operate at one teraflop and will be up to 100 times more energy efficient than a conventional machine of the same power. Scotland’s FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance will “develop software tools to enable programmers to create code for FPGA chips more easily.” FHPCA is led by Nallatech.
(Hat tip to Slashdot.)
For those of you who stumbled here via Google and might not be in the know, an FPGAs are specialized chips that have transistors connected into the most basic functional blocks–logical ands, ors, and multipliers that are used to execute any computer code. Rather than being hard-wired in a predetermined configuration as they are in traditional processors, connections between the functional blocks can be set and reset in FPGAs.
