Slashdot Mirror
FPGA Supercomputers
olafva writes: "You may be interested in this new breakthrough! See NASA Press Release and a couple of today's local stories for a remarkable paradigm shift in "Computing Faster without CPUs"." CmdrTaco said he'd believe it when he saw it. Well, they've got pictures. (Update: 03/29 5:02 PM by michael : At NASA's request, we've modified the links in the above story to reduce the load on their Public Affairs website. The same content is at the new links.)
An FPGA is a combination hardware/software device. If you passed that Digital Circuit Design class back in college, you remember that you can implement a 20-bit divider using - what - 84 NOR gates or something like that? There are orders of magnitude more gates in these devices, and orders of magnitude more complicated tasks can be accomplished.
You write a 'program' as a collection of declarative statements from the "Predicate Calculus" around the internal structure of input and output pins, and the FGPG compiler figures out which "gates" to "program" in the "field".
As the number of gates, intermediate terms, inputs, and outputs has grown, so has the complexity of the expressions, thus programs, that these puppies can handle.
There are a lot of groups working on similar stuff:
There are several more groups - you can find a more complete list on the People section of ISI's web site.
The important things to note:
1) Even though you can reprogram an FPGA in about a millisecond, the logistics of getting all the right programs to all the right FPGAs on a very dense board is left as an exercise to the reader (hint -- it is not a simple walk in the park).
2) Even though you can reprogram an FGPA in about a millisecond (yielding the claimed 1000 times a second machine re-configuration), it takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for the typical VHDL or similar program to produce the code that you will want to download to those FPGAs. And, of course, if you want disimmilar loads for various groupings of those chips, you will need to repeat the above with feeling, over and over, and over.
3) This particular company was crowing about their patented graphical programming language last year, and also didn't have anything real to show. In other words, no one had actually seen them push buttons, and have this magical language actually produce runnable code for all those FPGA's to do anything useful.
As near as I can tell, this whole thing is based on some guy's idea of raising money so he can drive fast cars, etc, etc. What really hurts is seeing NASA geeting sucked into this black hole...
it takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for the typical VHDL or similar program to produce the code that you will want to download to those FPGAs
It takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for my compiler to build a medium or large project. But I don't store the source code on my computer to run, I store the object code, so I don't care how long the compiler takes to produce it.
I've never used an FPGA; would it not be possible to do the same thing for them? Compile a program once into "FPGA code" which then gets stored as the executable file to be sent to the chip when invoked?
Will it run DOS?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
NewsRelease
National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
Langley Research Center
Hampton, Virginia 23681-2199
Bill Uher
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
(757) 864-3189
For Release: March 26, 2001
For those you can read the Word Document
RELEASE NO. 01-021
NASA Langley to test New Hyper Computer System
Computing Faster Than Engineers Can Think
NASA Langley engineers are exploring new tools and techniques that may move them and the projects they develop beyond the serial world into a parallel universe.
Via a Space Act Agreement, NASA Langley Research Center will receive a HAL (Hyper Algorithmic Logic)-15 Hypercomputer from Star Bridge Systems, Inc. of Midvale, Utah. The system is said to be faster and more versatile than any supercomputer on the market and will change the way we think about computational methods.
Taking up no more space than a standard desktop computer and using no more electrical current than an hair drier, the HAL-15 is the first of a new breed of high performance computer that replaces the traditional central processing units with faster Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These are specialty chips on a circuit board that can reconfigure themselves hundreds or thousands of times a second. This makes it possible for multiple applications to run at the same time on the same chips making them 1000 times faster than traditional commercial CPUs. This maximizes the use of millions of transistors (gates) on each silicon array. Traditional processors, because of their general purpose design, are wasteful, since for most applications they use only a small fraction of their silicon at any time.
HAL is programmed graphically using the company?s proprietary programming language, VIVA. This language facilitates rapid custom software development by the system?s users. Besides NASA Langley, other users will include the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Department of Defense, Hollywood film industry and the telecommunications industry.
-more-
NASA Langley is among the first in the world to get ?hands on? experience with the new system. It will be implemented to explore:
-Solutions for structural, electromagnetic and fluid analysis
-Radiation analysis for astronaut safety
-Atmospheric science analysis
-Digital signal processing
-Pattern recognition
-Acoustic analysis
Media Briefing: A media briefing will be held at 9 a.m., Tuesday, March 27, at the Pearl Young Theater Newsroom, Bldg. 1202, 5 North Dryden Street at NASA Langley Research Center. There will be a news briefing and short demonstration at 9 am followed by a demonstration and discussion for scientists and engineers. HAL developer Kent Gilson and Star Bridge Systems, Inc. CEO Brent Ward will conduct the demonstration. Two Langley researchers, Dr. Robert Singletarry and Dr. Olaf Storaasli, trained on the new system and will report on their first-hand experiences with the hypercomputer.
-end-
... on slashdot? Not that I don't welcome more news on the subject, but I remember the story on StarBridge, which was greeted with nearly universal skepticism (I among the skeptics, I'll admit). Wonder how they're doing with investors now?
--
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I am 36. I turn 37 in April. Birthdays don't necessarilly match year-end dates or OS anniversaries precisely. To clarify, I began playing with Linux early in 1992.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Point well taken. I wasn't trying to disprove anything, merely cite by example that learning a new skill as one grows older isn't a problem at all. As for it being easier to learn when young, that is true of some things (languages) at particularly early years (before six or eight years of age being the typical ages cited), but is certainly unproven for anything beyond that. For example, IFAIK it is unproven that learning German at 21 is easier than learning German would be at 31 or 41.
To answer your question, it is quite likely that my screenplays will suck far worse than the Matrix.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Somebody with years of experience in traditional programming probably won't find their skills translate too easily. The investment in layers of abstraction built on traditional processors is too big ever to throw away, but this kind of a machine is a nifty trick to have available.
It is extremely cool to have this technology emerging. As for our years of skills translating, or not, it isn't really all the important. We will simply learn how to program this new equipment, from scratch if necessary.
It is a myth that the young learn better than the less-young. As an example, I learned German at 21 (and am now very fluent), Linux at 26, how to fly a plane at 33, and am now learning to write screenplays at 36. (As an amusing counterpoint I will almost certainly never learn to spell, even at 60. Not because I cannot, but because I have better things to do with my time, and a spell checker when absolutely necessary, but most of all, because I take perverse pleasure in yanking the grammar nazis' chains). While I doubt I'll be performing any airshows, or attending the Oscars, anytime soon, the point remains: we have already been taught how to think and learn. Learning how to use and program FPGAs won't be that big of a problem, with or without years of programming experience behind us.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Wow, sound's like it could be usefull for CERTAIN things, but still amazing nonetheless. I always hear of this amazing new technology coming out, FPGA Supercomputers, solid state hard drives, REAL 3D monitor's that cost $5 to make from existing LCD displays, emulated gills to breathe under water, etc.
I just wish some of these things could make it to my house. Is it because of the ridicilous marketing and business planning that these inventions depend on to succeed, or is it just because they don't want to market these ideas and sell them to dead end companies?
I'm not totally sure, but i'd like to know whats stopping some of these things from making it to the end user.
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
I couldn't read the press release (MS Word - bah), but judging from the websites, the FPGA is dynamically programmed to perform very specific tasks in hardware.
Since these specific tasks can run in hardware, they will run 1000 times faster than a Pentium. There is no way in the world this machine is going to run general purpose applications at this speed. Only very specific, small, algorithms. Sorry, no 6000 fps for Quake ;-)
This makes the machine useless for everyday use in your home. However, I agree this machine may be very usefull for flight-control computers.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
From the Daily Press coverage: "People could hook into central hypercomputers to run their entire households -- from the coffee pot to the television set, the shower to the garage door"
Yeah, that's exactly what springs to my mind when I try to come up with uses for a supercomputer the size of a PC. To run my coffee pot.
Finally I can actually make coffee at home; I've always wondered how they ran the coffee pot at 7-11 - where I buy all my coffee - but now I know: They use a supercomputer!
:wq!
One would have thought that the natural format to choose for a press release on a web site would be HTML, just like the rest of the web site it is hosted on. That way, 100% of the world's Internet users, who are the only ones that will be able to retrieve the file, will be able to read it, regardless of the operating systems and user software they choose to install and/or pay for.
Further, most of the 95% of the World that you believe use MS Word are not the people that will have any interest in reading about this. The people who are interested are mainly scientists and engineers, two groups who tend to be more likely than average to use a platform other than a PC running some version of Windows. These guys are more likely to write things in LaTeX than Word. But they will have an equal chance with everyone else of being able to read HTML.
I certainly don't have any software installed on my system that can read Word files. I know of several programs that could do an aproximate conversion, but why should I install extra software, using my time and computing resources, to read this, when its not even close to the format that any reasonable person would have expected it to be in anyway?
Damn it. Don't post comments first thing in the morning without the proper ammount of coffee!
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
So, NASA makes this announcement, and Sony goes right around and announces that they have been working closely with NASA to develop the Playstation 5 based on this technology. The PS5 which begat the Playstation 4 developed by the NSA which begat the Playstation 3 developed by IBM's super computer division will allow the game player to control the console from any NASA station in the world! Imagine playing Tekken Tag Tournament Hyper Z 2K10 Script Kiddie Edition with the folks on the International Space Station! From all that I have read, I think I will have to wait for the PS5 instead of the PS4 and PS3. Thanks Sony marketing engine!!!!!!!
Bryan R.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
Enlighten my lack of knowledge... but what is a field programmable gate array (FPGA)? Is it another weird acronym like a Global Regular Expression Parser (grep) or Packet Internet Groper (PING)?
... and pictures, too.
HAL-15, desktop model (the one NASA is testing)
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/prod-hal1.html
HA-300, the rack-mounted, 12.8 TeraOp version
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/prod-hal3.html
The Star Bridge website seems strangely non-Slashdotted, considering how much trouble I had getting the NASA sites to load.
When I saw this one, I was sure it had to be an early April Fool's joke, but it looks like they're for real. The company's hype still sounds pretty pie in the sky, but if they can deliver even 10% of what they're promising, a hell of a lot of computational power could be available in a few years.
They cite cost savings in chip design (simpler, lower power, etc.) and chipfab retooling as a point in their favor (a single type of chip, customized for different applications). They cite it for speed of implementation, rather than reduced cost, but presumably that would come later. The HAL-300 is priced somewhere around $26 million, so don't bother to check E.bay for a few months yet.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
I think the only real reason that NASA is going to be `one of the first', is simply the fact that nobody seems to buy these things. Which is a pity. What's really REALLY sad, is that their claim to have a $1000 version available by now (link to /. article) is still vaporware.
0x or or snor perron?!
If this thing could be reconfigured to be a better hardware graphics accelerator than a dedicated hardware graphics accelerator like the GeForce 3, then I'd REALLY be impressed :-)
75 GFLOPS for the GeForce 3 - kinda hard to beat.
Yep, shuffle sort can be implemented in O(n) on a massively parallel computer.
What'd be neat would be if they sold this thing at a price reflecting it's cost (an FPGA chip) rather than the customers ability to pay...then we could all play with them.
Of course, but this is actually easy to do. I remember taking a VLSI design course (based on the Carver Mead/Lynn Conway book) back in college around 1980 and designing a "memory cell" with a built-in comparator that could swap the contents with the neighboring cell.... the "sort algorithm" then consists of loading the memory and clocking it N times! :-)
It was used for calculating the gravitational interaction of thousands of bodies -- a very parallel and complex problem. The solution was many custom processors in parallel, and it was so successful (and cheap!) that it outperformed multi-million dollar supercomputers at a fraction of the cost.
The downside was that it was a single-use system -- it could only to the calculation it was hard-wired to do.
Since the site is slammed, I can't see what they're actually doing... but the name is sure close. The FPGA idea is neat, because it would relieve the single-use limitation.
I'm still not holding my breath waiting for one of these to appear under my desk, though...
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
"There's no such thing as NT on the Alpha chip."
Actually, there is.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
FPGAs can't outperform custom hardware. They can outperform CPUs because CPUs are general-purpose hardware that run programs in serial, while FPGAs are general-purpose hardware that run programs in parallel. But special-purpose hardware will always win. (Whatever technology you make the FPGA out of, you could just make the custom hardware on the same process and get an order of magnitude improvement.)
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
No, nothing short of an infinitely-parallel machine can do O(n) for sorting. Remember, the big-O notation refers to asymptotic complexity, which means the problem size increases without bound. If your computer is not infinitely parallel, then there will exist some n which is too large to fit.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
HAL, yeah, right, "Open the goatsex link HAL" "I'm sorry Dave, you know I can't do that"
And we're still 2 days from 01-04-01.
Best Slashdot Co
neato.
I wonder; would it be more useful to market these as reprogrammable CPUs? Ie, don't make the poor hardware designer design the whole CPU, but give them a few instructions that you'll take care of the decoding and commit-in-order and speculation, but they get to design the actual instruction.
Outlinish they'd declare: this instruction reads registers x,y,z, writes a,b,c, and will require so many cycles to complete after inputs.
Has this been tried and failed, is this what they do, or are there other reasons why It Would Never Work?
I guess what I'm getting at is that yeah, a programmer could design & layout the chip according to his needs, but wouldn't it be better to describe the chip (ala C-Program), and run it through another system that would program your chip most efficiently?
I want to see a grid of 1000x1000 single bit clocked cells that can be reprogrammed on the fly... I'll pay up to US$300 for one to play with, provided it does the clocking as I specified above. At a bare minimum I could do FFTS in real time on a 100Mhz 12 bit data stream with it.
--Mike--
Um... that Word file tried to change my normal.dot template. Did anyone else encounter this? Is NASA spreading infected Word files?
"Within 10 years, we should use this machine in various places, handling various problems," Singleterry said.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
Abiword runs on just about any platform you can use on a PC and reads MS Word files pretty well. It reads this press release just fine.
SteveStarbridge systems named it hal, nasa bought it from them.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
What Happened To Starbridge's Supercomputer
Reconfigurable Supercomputers
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
I'm a programmer at Xilinx working on an internal tool our IP developers use, and I have to say that that's not how FPGAs work. The boards have flipflops and LUTs (Look Up Tables) in a regular matrix; the LUTs hold 16 values and act essentially as truth tables indexed by 4 inputs. Hence they can imitate any gate with the same number of inputs, be it XOR or NAND or any other gate (or even some combination of 2-input gates which has 4 inputs and a single output). This is, of course, a very simplified explanation, but the principle is the same even with the more advanced FPGAs.
'Gates' figures on FPGAs are thus rough estimates of how many NAND gates would be needed to provide similar functionality.
Savant
Naw, if NASA really wanted to screw with the SETI@Home crowd they could plant some false positives.
t
Hehe..
Suddenly Quicksort is not the best sort algorythm, and the traveling salesman becomes possible to solve!
Even though we touched on hypercomputing at university, some of the basic premises I have, and rule-of-thumb knowledge I have will be outdated.
I have to learn anew to program using logic, and logic blocks, at least I'll get back to my scientific (mathemetic) roots!
Whee...
For once Computer Science may actually become more of a Science!
Hehe... I realise this.
It does get easier... this machine's design gives it an order of improvement, and not just N times faster. This is, sadly, still below the factorial scale of most NP-complete problems.
Just making a point that what we have been taught may be nullified by advances in technology. Things like quantum computers may however approach that computing capacity, and I see this machine as a step in the right direction.
They're calling it HAL. Mommy.
I wonder if you could make a specialized machine, with a bunch of FPGAs, solely for the purpose of AI for massive scale online games. Most MMORPGs have famously stupid AI because making smart creature AI takes both lots of cycles and very good code. Could a specialized box designed for these computations be a salable device?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Does anyone else find it slightly disturbing that NASA would name a computer "HAL"? 2001 anyone?
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
NASA's SETI@Home team has unexpectedly jumped ahead of all other teams, with 3.74 billion work units processed over the last three days. A NASA spokesperson has been quoted as saying "Up yours, Sun Micro!"
He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. - "Big Al" Einstein
Um... that Word file tried to change my normal.dot template. Did anyone else encounter this? Is NASA spreading infected Word files?
For some reason, Word always does that to me whenever I try to open two or more documents at the same time. I don't know why and I wish it would stop, but it doesn't seem to be a virus. (I just scanned with NAV and the document came up clean.)
--
BACKNEXTFINISHCANCEL
... a Beowulf cluster of these. *punch* *ow* *sorry, sorry!* *ow*
But what are its specs on the dreaded Q3 fps test?
"Dr. Chandra, will I dream?"
"No, but you will be sued to oblivion over your name."
These guys jumped the gun. April 1 is a couple of days off.
I've been watching this company since 1999 or so. Back then they were claiming they would have a box on the market priced in PC-range within 18 months. Looks like that's going to remain vaporware for the foreseeable future. Now the only mention I can find on their website about it is this:
Personal computers. The company believes that some day PCs will come equipped with the same supercomputer technology found in the company's Hypercomputers.
Surely this is some sort of April Fools joke, right? I mean, the damn thing is called HAL. Also.. I'm sure were all aware that the current year is 2001, which would make this sort of joke much more likely. Ratguy
I emailed them about this at the time, but didn't receive a reply 8o)
Scroll down to the "Machines that Invent" heading for the really interesting part. David
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory .cfm?Story_ID=539808
I hadn't been able to open the page with pictures when I wrote this, and I don't think I'll bother now. It does sound like Labview. I program in Labview. It's a good way to design a screen form, but a terrible way to code. I'd rather code in C (or better yet, some higher-level text-based language) with some tool to allow what-you-see-is-what-you-get screen designs, but our biggest customer made the choice of LabView... (I'm not prejudiced against graphic design in general -- when I'm doing circuit designs, I prefer drawing a schematic to coding in VHDL or Verilog. But if you are coding software, text does work better.)
Besides that, I wonder how well their software really works. From what I've heard about conventional FPGA design software, you code in a C-like language (Verilog or VHDL), then run a simulation to verify the code, then you try to compile it to a physical layout -- and try, and try, and try. If fast operation is needed, you've got to intervene manually to arrange the layout so connections on critcal paths are short. If you want to use even half the gates on the chip, you've got to intervene manually in the layout so it doesn't run out of connection paths in the densest areas. I don't think it likely that these people have found a magic way around that. More likely, their system will only work if you never try to use more than 1/4 of the possible gates or speed...
"why aren't we all ditching our amd's/pentiums and buying one of these little babies?"
A) It's only faster on certain problems where the computations can be performed massively in parallel. And most CPU's already spend 99% of their time waiting for data to arrive from memory or the hard drive, or for the operator to click the mouse.
B) It's a s-o-b to program. You aren't writing software, you are designing a custom hardware circuit to solve the problem, which is then implemented by programming logic gates and connections in the chips. In other words, on a computing job where you could write a program in C in a week and it would run in 1 minute on a PC, on FPGA's it might take a year to design and run in a millisecond. So if reducing the run time is worth paying six figures for software development, go for it... Maybe the HAL people have found a way to ease the programming, but it's still going to be quite a lot harder than normal programming.
Just guessing this box might hold 100 FPGA's at $25 each. Plus it has to have a normal computer in there to hand the programs and data out to the FPGA's. So it costs more than a PC, but maybe not as much as a top-end workstation (depending on how big a profit margin they are taking). It's great for a rocket navigational system, but the only down to earth applications I can think of for a machine this big are professional video processing, weather prediction, and some really heavy engineering simulations.
On a smaller scale, cell phones and future modems are likely to include some FPGA-like circuits, probably as a small part of a custom chip rather than as a separate FPGA. When a new protocol comes out requiring revised circuit design, you do the changes in the FPGA program and distribute it to be downloaded.
No government could stop this; FPGA's are sold worldwide and used extensively for prototyping and occasionally for production. Maybe they'll try to restrict the HAL programming language.
"It uses no more energy than a hair dryer" That is 1500 watts. My apartment is small enough that I would have to keep the windows open in the wintertime to keep from roasting in here...
I attended the press briefing. First I would like to note that the presentor was a very likable guy who was open to questions and very knowledgeable. He had an example with the HAL computer calculating the Julian set vs. a PIII 850. The difference was amazing. You could zip around the set on the HAL, where the PIII kinda skipped around about 1/3 fps. Finally the price that was quoted 1 millllion dolllars!!! Worth it?? Time will tell.
"My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality." - Muad'Dib
Current FPGAs don't run faster than general purpose CPUs, Megahertz-wise; actually, nowhere near it. The advantage is that you can do lots of things in parallel, though eg build a massively parallel machine. It's a huge task to take a machine like this (effectively a bunch of empty chips) and make it do something useful.
The company who makes these computers has been around for a few years.
As to reconfiguring 1000s of times per second, that seems a bit unlikely. Typically programming time on a Xilinx FPGA is at least a second, in my experience.
Hamish
Disclaimer: I work with FPGAs for a living.
Ya gotta love it when someone quotes the press release verbatim and it gets modded "funny."
I used to work for a company that manufactures a very similar device as an add on card for PCs. True enough, a single transistor on the FPGA in each of these devices is capable of firing much faster than the clock speed of available processors. However, this is the switching speed of a single transistor on the device. When transistors are chained together, you get a phenomenon called gate delay, which is the amount of time each transistor takes to react to its inputs before the output level is changed. So if a single transistor is 1000 times faster than the clock speed of a PII, and we chain 1000 of these transistors together, our usable clock speed is now the same as the PII. Another item of worry for the designers of the image to go on the FPGA is clock tree generation. The clock signal for the FPGA must be generated in such a way that all areas of the chip are synchronized. Very often, the clock tree is the biggest problem in the design as it skews as each route gets longer.
These devices are fantastic if you have a very specific application that you wish to design them for (e.g. Image processing, voice analysis, SETI@Home). With the ability to be reconfigured at a moments notice, they are also much more reusable than an ASIC. But don't be misled by the speeds given in the marketing info. Get a demo chip from Altera or Xilinx and play with it for a while. Then make your own judgements about speed.