Hi all, Those who participated in our past Sprint in Lyngby have met Ruben. He is the one who kindly packaged all that needed to be packaged for the first and yet only completely Open Source toolchain for FPGA computing. Details are on http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice .
Ruben started that page which takes you by the hand to get some LEDs blinking on a 20something $/€ device that attaches to your USB port. It features a series of I/O ports to do just about anything or just compute (i.e. accelerate) on the device itself. I got a "thank you for that page"-email yesterday (Ruben started it, I just added some references). It is about the first time this ever happened to me :o) Anyway, so it seems like there is some accumulating momentum and people are kind of uncertain about what to do. I tell you: There is no risk in spending those 25 $/€, which actually should be some 80 $/€ for a better performing 8K device. While I have little doubt that both for Xilinx and Altera we will also see something evolving in the near future (anybody tried to get a free webpack license for the only Spartan-6 compatible older ISE tools? something needs to happen on that front). The yosys/arachne-pnr/icetools packages of the free pipeline instantaneously sky rocketed to almost 140 users. Anyway - I think we are on the forefront of a significant movement here. This combination of free programming tools and cheap devices for programmable hardware is completely new. Please keep your eyes and ears open. There are closed-source implementations of Smith-Waterman on FPGA out there, not so much on BLAST. Those first devices do not have the memory to help much with accelerating sequence comparison - the usb port is too lame and there is not enough memory on the device to keep the data. But this is all just a matter of time. Hack along! And maybe make some noise with your engineers on site for whom a PCI/USB3 card with such an FPGA and a couple of gigs of memory on board is likely little more than a master thesis away. Cheers, Steffen