On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 12:02:42AM +0000, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote: > There are people looking at clusters of FPGAs, with processors either > instantiated in the FPGA logic, or part of the fabric (e.g. PowerPC cores > in Xilinx FPGAs).
Notice that Parallella Epiphany is basically an on-die DSP (TigerSHARC) cluster on a mesh, with the ARM core being a part of the Zynq 7020 FPGA. They claim a 8x better power efficiency than BlueGene/Q (benchmarks don't lie, liars do benchmarks). I do expect that you can do interesting things with these spare 48 pins of FPGA I/O on that board, along with the GBit Ethernet. > > However, you pay a power penalty for FPGA vs the same computation in "non > reprogrammable logic" (e.g. An ASIC). I don't know that this is a > fundamental limitation.. You probably can't make a FPGA cell as small as a > ASIC cell, though. > > > >From the Beowulf standpoint, though, I don't know if there's anything that > could be called a "commodity" FPGA platform that has consumer prices. I would say that 99/199 USD for the 16/64 core Epiphany dev kits is pretty consumer-friendly, though it's not Beowulf in the sense that it's single-vendor, and not COTS. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
