COMPUTATION ACCELERATION ON SGI RASC: FPGA BASED RECONFIGURABLE COMPUTING HARDWARE

In this paper a novel method of computation using FPGA technology is presented. In severalcases this method provides a calculations speedup with respect to the General PurposeProcessors (GPP). The main concept of this approach is based on such a design of computinghardware architecture to fit algorithm dataflow and best utilize well known computingtechniques as pipelining and parallelism. Configurable hardware is used as a implementationplatform for custom designed hardware. Paper will present implementation results ofalgorithms those are used in such areas as cryptography, data analysis and scientific computation.The other promising areas of new technology utilization will also be mentioned,bioinformatics for instance. Mentioned algorithms were designed, tested and implemented onSGI RASC platform. RASC module is a part of Cyfronet’s SGI Altix 4700 SMP system. Wewill also present RASC modern architecture. In principle it consists of FPGA chips and veryfast, 128-bit wide local memory. Design tools avaliable for designers will also be presented