Reconfigurable Computing Aspects of the Cray XD1

ABSTRACT: Reconfigurable Computing (RC) refers to the use of reconfigurable hardware devices to accelerate the computational performance of a system for particular applications. Cray’s new XD1 computer presents an appealing substrate for RC research because it places Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in close proximity to host processor memory. In this paper we present our early experiences with the XD1 in the context of RC. In order to gain more insight into the inner mechanics of the architecture, we have constructed four simple FPGA-based applications: a data transfer engine, a linear sorting array, a data hashing function, and a distance calculation kernel that involves double-precision floating-point operations