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Really, this doesn't sound any different than loadable microcode, which nobody's cared much about for the last 20 years. Processing power is pretty cheap these days, so there's no reason to make a processor "retargetable", it just increases the cost and reduces the performance.

As pointed out by someone else in this thread, Cray Canada makes the XD1 Opteron cluster (http://www.cray.com/products/xd1/index.html) with FPGAs built in. Might cost a little more than a PCIe card though. :-) They can even be programmed in C now, rather than a full-blown hardware design language like Verilog, since Cray bundles a special C-to-FPGA compiler.

I also went to demo of the SRC6 (SRC = Seymour Roger Cray, Cray's last spinoff in Colorado that has never quite taken off) here at the U of I in Urbana-Champaign. It appears to have similar capabilities and is quite neat, but is a smaller system. (http://www.srccomp.com/HardwareElements.htm) Somebody who knows more about these machines could probably point out more differences...

True, the FPGAs for the XD1 are optional.

Also, the company founded by Seymore Cray that the parent poster mentioned is now called SRC (http://www.srccomp.com/ ). They are currently the world leader in building this type of machine - they actually have a working C & Fortran compiler that will compile code into FPGA gates. And it works. Today. You can also stick with VHDL/Verilog if you desire.

SGI is also working on a system with FPGAs but they don't have a compiler - yet. They have some 3rd party support (Celoxica, and others) and they also support VHDL/Verilog designs.

plus the computer company
SRC computers
http://www.srccomp.com/
who makes fpga based computers now and their
software development environment isnt vaporware.

Meanwhile FPGAs have displaced DSPs, FFTs and are overtaking CPUs for embedded applications. There are even rumblesof FPGAs seriously impacting the HPC market. Times are a changin so I'm not surprised to see traditional CPU-based CS research being downsized in response to this paradigm shift. Perhaps we need to take VIVA seriously just as Cray, SGI, Starbridge Systems, SRC, Nallatech and others are doing.

Actually, in the year between crash of Cray Computer (in March 1995) and his death in an auto accident, Seymour Cray started a new company, SRC Computers, which still exists, and makes a parallel Pentium-based computer (which also incorporates custom hardware processing elements). I believe that this product is the same thing he was working on from the start of that company in 1996.

Interestingly, SRC is still around without any evidence on their website
of shipping a product. My guess is that their customers and/or investors
prefer to stay out of the limelight.

As for the physics stuff being obsolete, I'd say that it's not. Now this isn't because I don't think there's something better we could be doing, but because there isn't yet....

When Seymour died in a Colorado car accident in 1996, he had just started another supercomputer company, named after his initials, in Colorado Springs. Last year they shipped a cluster-based system. Seymore had a history of starting high performance companies (Control Data, Cray, Cray Reserch, SRC) and then parting from them.

He died in a car accident in 1996 shortly after founding SRC Computers (the "similarly named company" you mention; SRC is his initials). The company's page has a brief history of his work, though I'm sure there are plenty of more-complete such histories out there.

He died in a car accident in 1996 shortly after founding SRC Computers (the "similarly named company" you mention; SRC is his initials). The company's page has a brief history of his work, though I'm sure there are plenty of more-complete such histories out there.

Remember back 5+ years ago, there was a Cray Research (that built the T3-E) and a Cray Computer (that was still building vector machines - the last of which was never bought by anyone [Cray-4])

If you want to see where Seymour's influence still reigns - check out SRC Computers . Hint: SRC doesn't stand for "source" - it's Seymour's initials.

I'll add one more group: SRC Computing (Seymour Cray's last company he started before he died tragically). Check out their MAP architecture.

I'll add one more group: SRC Computing (Seymour Cray's last company he started before he died tragically). Check out their MAP architecture.