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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...
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-
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
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?
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
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
... a Beowulf cluster of these. *punch* *ow* *sorry, sorry!* *ow*
"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...
Ya gotta love it when someone quotes the press release verbatim and it gets modded "funny."