Browsing by Author "Craven, Stephen"

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    Dynamic Hardware Development
    Craven, Stephen; Athanas, Peter M. (Hindawi, 2008-10-15)
    Applications that leverage the dynamic partial reconfigurability of modern FPGAs arefew, owing in large part to the lack of suitable tools and techniques to create them. Whilethe trend in digital design is towards higher levels of design abstractions, forgoing hardwaredescription languages in some cases for high-level languages, the development of a reconfigurabledesign requires developers to work at a low level and contend with many poorlydocumented architecture-specific aspects. This paper discusses the creation of a high-leveldevelopment environment for reconfigurable designs that leverage an existing high-level synthesistool to enable the design, simulation, and implementation of dynamically reconfigurablehardware solely from a specification written in C. Unlike previous attempts, this approachencompasses the entirety of design and implementation, enables self-re-configurationthrough an embedded controller, and inherently handles partial reconfiguration. Benchmarkingnumbers are provided, which validate the productivity enhancements this approachprovides.
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    Examining the Viability of FPGA Supercomputing
    Craven, Stephen; Athanas, Peter M. (2007-01-10)
    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).