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It may be too late, but perhaps someone could talk with Viva Computing, LLC who now owns the assets of Star Bridge Systems. It was not specified in the news release if they also own the intellectual property.

Lamgley,
Paper E3,
Paper 161 and even a 110MB video of students
programming FPGAs at NASA

What will Starbridge Systems think about that? Didn't they develop a dynamically reconfigurable computer that ran Windows NT as a test application on 10,000+ FPGAs back in the 90ies? IIRC, they also had a software framework able to automatically implement software fragments in hardware using FPGA auto-configuration.

Self-repairing computer systems for spacecraft have been in the discussion for decades, and every now and then we get hear about a new project. This project certainly is a good idea, hopefully it will work.

BTW, Motorola (now Freescale) developed self-repairing processors for military applications a couple of years ago.

Star Bridge Systems specializes in FPGA computers and tools to program them. It's been a while since I've checked up on them, but I'm pretty sure the NSA was/is one of their customers. http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

Oh lord I have been waiting for this for so long. Here's a fun link: http://starbridgesystems.com/

This is pretty old news - I still recall Star Bridge Systems from back in 1997. Don't hold your breath.

Star Bridge Systems did this YEARS ago!!!!!!!!!!! This is not new or news!!!

First heard about reconfigurable computing here on /. The company Starbridge is still going strong and long past the vaporware stage.

Does anyone else remember Starbridge, the self-proclaimed "Hypercomputing Company" and their promise of FPGA-based machines? They were in the news several years ago, but I haven't heard mention of them recently. It seems to me that the huge hurdle in such systems is programming the FPGA's, and Starbridge claims to have developed a graphical programming environment for just such a purpose, called Viva. Can anyone here familiar with them give some insight as to the success of their efforts?

Does anyone else remember Starbridge, the self-proclaimed "Hypercomputing Company" and their promise of FPGA-based machines? They were in the news several years ago, but I haven't heard mention of them recently. It seems to me that the huge hurdle in such systems is programming the FPGA's, and Starbridge claims to have developed a graphical programming environment for just such a purpose, called Viva. Can anyone here familiar with them give some insight as to the success of their efforts?

Sure, I didn't RTFA. But I'm linking anyway. Starbridge Systems, makers of FPGA computers for a number of years now.

Done already: http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

At least NASA has bought some of their machines.

Slashdot ran previous articles on StarBridge Systems and their Hypercomputers that are built on massive parallel FPGA processors. And their operating system/Programming Environment, Viva is not vaporware. I can't find a reference to it, but I'm fairly certain the French department of energy already purchased one for researching nuclear blast yields.

Despite the initial handwaving about having these on our desktops, I think it's going to be a while before that happens. Still, it's a very cool idea.

Slashdot ran previous articles on StarBridge Systems and their Hypercomputers that are built on massive parallel FPGA processors. And their operating system/Programming Environment, Viva is not vaporware. I can't find a reference to it, but I'm fairly certain the French department of energy already purchased one for researching nuclear blast yields.

Despite the initial handwaving about having these on our desktops, I think it's going to be a while before that happens. Still, it's a very cool idea.

There's a company that has been selling this type of system for a couple of years.

They also have their own language called Viva to be able to program the computer.

Link: http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

A company named Starbridge Systems has already been doing this for several years now, and they're software isn't vaporware. They also have clients like Nasa. Follow the link for more information: http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

"No one has ever tried to build a big supercomputer with these chips before," Parsons says.
That is wrong star bridge systems
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/
have been selling the hypercomputer for some years now.

http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

These guys have been claiming to have this and their software (VIVA) to run it for years. Who knows if it is real... I've certainly never seen one running.

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.

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.

Take a look at StarBridge Systems, who have been advocating this approach for years. When they first came out (with claims of 100-1000 fold performance improvement of vector supercomputers for certain applications at 1/10 the price) they were the vaporware of the high-performance computing industry. I didn't believe in it either, but slowly we're all coming around.

What about FPGA based supercomputers? Like these: http://www.starbridgesystems.com/

well sorta.

Star Bridge Systems has been selling computers that reconfigure their own logic (with the help of compilers) for about 5 years now. True, their solution isn't a single chip, but the idea of reconfigurable computing is not at all new, and Star Brigdes implementation appears to be even more flexible.

reminds me of Starbridge and this and this previous slashdot stories. I have always been interested in the subject, unfortunately in most of the cases similar products end up as vaporware

That's what reconfigurable computing is all about. reconfigure to suit your current needs...

link

"My job for the past several months has been to obtain and evaluate these tools. I can tell you that these tools are not there yet."
Did you try Viva, a 3D Graphical icon alternative to 1D linear ASCII coding in Verilog, VHDL, Forge, DK1, JHDL etc? You can test/run Viva on your PC in addition to targeting it to FPGAs. Perhaps Star Bridge will let you try a courtesy copy, as they did for graduate students in the Parallel Computing Class I teach.

VivaHelp.htm

Viva Help System

comp.arch thread

VivaHelp.htm

Viva Help System

comp.arch thread

Oh yes and there is this
Star Bridge

I can't stand testimonials.

BTW Kent Gilson, the founder, appears to be a high school drop out with more than one failed project behind him. How many more hits is it going to take this guy to make it.

Thus, the learning process depends, initially on two factors: the structure at time 0 (the initial structure, e.g. the brain when you are born) and the structure at the time a person receive the impulses (the brain after experimenting and processing all the impulses one got up to now). That means, genetics influence your behaviour because your brain is biased by the structure it has when you are born, but the environment is the one that provides the impulses

The introduction to this article addresses most of your points: "Iterative Matrix Equation Solver for a Reconfigurable FPGA-Based Hypercomputer". I'm certainly no expert in chip design, but what they are saying makes some sense:

Your point about speed:

"... the collection of FPGA:s emulating a standard CPU would be way slower ..."

Their point is that you aren't emulating a standard CPU. Their approach is for application that involve "Solving systems of simultaneous linear equations ...". The traditional approach is many generic CPU's in parallel.From the article:

"However, this type of parallelism is inefficient, using only a small fraction of CPU resources at any given time, while the rest of the silicon lies idle and wastes power. CPUs are designed to be general and capable of performing any function they will ever need to perform. Therefore, they contain many resources that are rarely used. In addition, the inter processor communication time required by traditional matrix equation solvers seriously limits the number of processors that may operate efficiently in parallel optimize chips is normally a long and tedious process not available or feasible to most programmers."

You argue cost:

... for any given budget for CPU:s ... and way more expensive.

The article argues that probably replace a single FPGA with a whole lot of CPU's (because it can process as much in parallel as you can cram on the chip). One could also point out that if this type of technology becomes more prevalent, higher production volumes would lower FPGA costs. I guess we'd have to see some ROI analysis - how many CPU's can they replace with an FPGA? Could you get one workstation class device to replace a cluster or mainframe? Most of their articles discuss a technology in the Proof of Concept stage - so it will be a while before we can talk about which situations it pays off to use this in.

Your third point, its hard to code FPGA's:

"...translating from low-level code to actual chip surface ... is largely a manual even for very simple circuits, largely because the available chip-compiler technologies simply aren't up to the job."

A major thrust of StarBridge systems seems to be creating easy to use and effective tools to do exactly this. Read the sections about their Viva technology. Even if it doesn't do it perfectly, it may do it good enough.

... you'd thing they would use it to host their web page har har!

Of course, the slashdotting it is starting to succomb to might be because they spent do much on developing the machine that they could only afford hosting off a single little DSL connection. After all, they certainly haven't spend much on PR either as they do not garner many search hits on the net or widespread press...

Is "hypercopmuter" a real word with a standardized definition?

Our products include the implementation of the relatively new computer chip, the FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) along with our patented Viva software, to form what we term 'Hypercomputers'. These machines are capable of truly extraordinary computational feats. The result is simply the creation of a new kind of computer system that gives users tremendous power with an intuitive, state-of-the-art software tool.

I'd like to expand on this question. I've been intrigued by FPGA's since I first read about them. To my (admittedly relatively untrained) mind, they seem like the ultimate platform: an infinitely reconfigurable piece of computer hardware. It would seem like an FPGA, with its gates programmed for optimum efficiency for a given task, should be able to kick the pants off a traditional fixed architecture cpu. If this isn't the case, can someone tell me why? Someone once told me that the distances between various virtual components in a configured FPGA slowed things down; is this true? Why don't we see desktops made with these? (I suppose, if FPGAs are really expensive enough to warrant the price tag on this doo-dad, that'd be one reason.) There actually is a company called Star Bridge Systems who make computers with FPGAs. They even promised a "desktop supercomupter" a few years back. But apparently, they've given up on that (or decided that selling a few multi-million dollar supercomputers is better than selling lots of thousand dollar desktops). And even if FPGAs aren't much faster than regular chips, there's something about compiling your code down to the actual gate layout (rather than for a set gate structure) that just seems really, really cool.

This may be far fetched but I was thinking that with the new eda tools or any other super computer tool you can make a database of exploits for software and just hammer away at the software. Maybe even have some kind of super smart software that could change the exploited code to secure code. Doesn't sound to hard to do to me. Of course again I don't own a super computer to test the ideal, hehe. Though if I had enough money I would buy one of these bad boys and hire me a viva programmer and lease the machine for software testing!}

This may be far fetched but I was thinking that with the new eda tools or any other super computer tool you can make a database of exploits for software and just hammer away at the software. Maybe even have some kind of super smart software that could change the exploited code to secure code. Doesn't sound to hard to do to me. Of course again I don't own a super computer to test the ideal, hehe. Though if I had enough money I would buy one of these bad boys and hire me a viva programmer and lease the machine for software testing!}

• Starbridge systems tries to make processors much more efficient, thus providing more processing power on less space. They make use of FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), a lot of simple and stupid chips which can be reconfigured a couple of thousand times to run a combination of instructions most efficiently.
  
  
• IBM is developing as much as three interesting technologies simultaneously:
  - IBM tries to build hypercomputers (quantum computers), and research results look pretty promising. - a few images
  - They are going to build a One-Petaflop Supercomputer until 2005 utilizing 1,048,576 Processors (32 Cores per Chip, 64 CPUs per Board, 8 Boards per Frame, in 64 Frames) - Blue Gene Project
  - They are developing CPU Cores, where all execution units are connected asynchronously - that makes it easy to reach an extremly high clock frequency.
  

If they need a 1000 times speed increse
they really should talk to starbridge systems

and it is a 64bit chip that can also run 32 bit programs for backward compatibility...then I think Itanium will have a run for the money. Especially since IBM released their Power4 which (too my knowledge) is the first to have 2 processor cores on one die...something DEC was planning for the Alpha. It would be nice to see the G5 have something along the lines of the Power4 for sub $5,000 price. Of course now that Intel owns all the DEC stuff they gleen the good stuff from DEC technology and graft it on to their own. I am hoping that the Apple / PPC Linux world will be able to get the rest of the world to move away from x86. But...I also hoped the Alpha would survive. Who knows maybe even stuff from Starbridge Systems might be the next best thing....

http://www.starbridgesystems.com/cont-tech.html

I'm surprised I didn't see this at the top of the responses. These guys have, if their claims are accurrate (they are shipping hardware, supposedly to the likes of Nasa, so...), revolutionized both the FPGA development process and computer hardware architecture.

Their ideas seem to be based on the idea that a big array of FPGAs, which are reconfigured on the fly to suit a specific application at the gate level, is significantly (they claim orders of magnitude) faster than a conventional general purpose Von Neuman CPU or CPUs (even modern Athlons, etc). The frightening thing is that intuitively it makes sense to me, and if it really does work, it could change everything.

Obviously to make this work, they've developed a high-level language which compiles down to the FPGA level... They call it IIADL and/or Viva...

Looks fascinating.

-David

From pro-StarBridge (PDF) article:

... reconfigurable computers are uniquely fault-tolerant. If part of the hardware goes down, the remaining circuitry functions without it - a point Star Bridge has illustrated by shooting a hole in a circuit board and demonstrating that the computer continues to function without a glitch.

... There are those who already believe in the inevitability of hypercomputing dominance. "This is eventually going to change the way everything happens in the computing world," said Ed Bradley, a senior engineer in the munitions branch for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Florida's Eglin Air Force Base. "In the not too distant future, people will be tearing down Bill Gates statues and replacing them with statues of Kent Gilson."

:-)

Rich

Star Bridge Systems Inc. is the place NASA went to for their HAL-15, according to newsobserver.com.

Star Bridge Systems Inc. is the place NASA went to for their HAL-15, according to newsobserver.com.

Starbridge Systems popped up a few years ago (they might have been mentioned on /. even). At the time the things they claimed to do and their client list made them seem like yet another hoax (a la Linux on the N64). The prices they had on their web site at that time didnt help. I mean, who would buy a 94 million dollar (if I remember right) computer... even if you had a "black" budget?! But they didn't go away, and as I bounced around to jobs with big budgets, I heard rumblings and grumblings about this group or that department and Starbridge.

Now, with the mention in this article (even though it's dated in 4/01) maybe its time for an (in)famous /. interview?

StarBridge Systems uses these to make their supercomputers that run in Standard ATX case... And I think they charge around $15 million for the low end models. These info came from a slashdot story but I can remember when and I don't have time to verify. I just remember CmdrTaco being very sceptical.

Corrected Link

--

This is just laughable. Here's a snippet from the specs of their HAL-300 box, supposedly the superest-duperest computer in the world:

6. Built-in I/O:
S-VHS video channels in/out
RJ-11 telephony interfaces (POTS/DATA)
50 Mbytes/s reconfigurable in/out

I bet ASCI White wishes it had a S-VHS connection.

And guess which operating system it runs? That's right, Windows 98.

Go to starbridge's site and poke around a bit. The "HAL 300" was enough to make me spew coffee on my monitor I was laughing so hard.

The "faster than the IBM Pacific Blue (when simulating a 4-bit adder)" claims put the nail in their coffin for me. These guys are hucksters of the worst kind.