Star Bridge FPGA "HAL" More Than Just Hype

Gregus writes "Though mentioned or discussed in previous /. articles, many folks (myself included) presumed that the promises of Star Bridge Systems were hype or a hoax. Well the good folks at NASA Langley Research Center have been making significant progress with this thing. They have more info and videos on their site, beyond the press release and pictures posted here last year. So it's certainly not just hype (though $26M for the latest model is a bit beyond the $1,000 PC target)."

Comments

What is Star Systems?

[$$$$$exyGal]

Star Bridge Systems is the leading developer of truly parallel Hypercomputers.Our patent-pending hardware, software and Viva programming language are reinventing computer programmability to create the fastest, most versatile and energy-efficient computing systems available for solving many problems that require high computational density.

That's directly from their site. I wish the /. summary would have mentioned parallel hypercomputers. And note that when you search Google for "parallel hypercomputers", you only get get the one hit from Star Bridge Systems (and soon you'll get a hit for this comment on /. ;-)). No wonder people thought this was a hoax.

--sex

Re:What is Star Systems?

[SloWave]

Sounds like a Unisys type company setting themselves up for another bogus IP land grab.

Consumer usage

[W0lphAU]

I may be wau off here but it seems to me if your going to market this sort of product for the consumer market the point to emphasize would be the potential to pump out out millions of dirt cheap little processors exactly the same in manufacturing. and then apply the relevant "program" and turn them into a control chip for a coffeemaker or alarm clock or whatever

reconfigurable hype

[g4dget]

People have been trying to use FPGAs for general purpose computing for as long as there have been FPGAs. Reconfigurable computing turns out to be pretty hard--it's hard to program these kinds of machines.

Now, maybe someone will be able to make this go. But this company doesn't look like it. If you manage to get to their web site and look at the programming language "Viva" they have designed, it looks like you are drawing circuit diagrams. Imagine programming a complex algorithm with that.

There are already better approaches to programming FPGAs (here, here, here). Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google and browse around.

No magic -- sorry

[Anonymous Coward]

For a start: chip designers everywhere use FPGA:s to prototype their designs. No magic; they are reasonably fast (but not as fast as custom designed chips), and way more expensive. Having a large array of them would indeed make it possible to run DES at a frightening speed -- but so would a mass of standard computers. The sticking point is that the collection of FPGA:s emulating a standard CPU would be way slower for any given budget for CPU:s than a custom chip (like the PII, PIII or AMD K7) -- and way more expensive.

Think about it: both Intel and AMD (and everybody else) uses FPGA:s for prototyping their chips. If it was so much more efficient, why do they not release chips whith this technology already?

As for the reprogramming component part of this design: translating from low-level code to actual chip surface (which it still is very much about) is largely a manual even for very simple circuits, largely because the available chip-compiler technologies simply aren't up to the job.

Besides, have any of you thought about the context-switch penalty of a computer that will have to reprogram its' logic for every process :)

Re:No magic -- sorry

[seanadams.com]

For a start: chip designers everywhere use FPGA:s to prototype their designs.

Xilinx/Altera would not be in business if this were the only thing people used FPGAs for. There are some things you can do in an FPGA exceptionally well, eg pumping lots of data very quickly, and doing repetitive things like encryption, compression, and DSP functions. Generally speaking, the simpler the algorithm and the more it can be parallelized, the better it will work in hardware as compared to a CPU (yes, even a 4GHz pentium might be slower per $).

As for the reprogramming component part of this design: translating from low-level code to actual chip surface (which it still is very much about) is largely a manual even for very simple circuits, largely because the available chip-compiler technologies simply aren't up to the job.

I think it's a language problem more than a limitation of the synthethis/fitting tools. VHDL and Verilog are horrific. They are designed for coding circuits, not algorithms.

Besides, have any of you thought about the context-switch penalty of a computer that will have to reprogram its' logic for every process

With today's FPGAs this is a real problem. They're designed to be loaded once, when the system starts up. What we neeed is an FPGA that can store several "pages" of configurations, and switch between them rapidly. The config would need to be writeable over a very fast interface of course.

I still don't entirely believe it...

[wirelessbuzzers]

I looked at this site several years ago, and thought, "whoa, cool idea, FPGAs would make a really fast computer." Then for two years, nothing to show for this idea. And after I programmed some FPGAs, I realized (at least partly) why: they're too slow to program. It takes on the order of milliseconds to reprogram even a moderate-sized FPGA.

And even a very large FPGA would be pretty lousy at doing SIMD, vector ops, etc. Basically, they would suck at emulating a computer's instruction set, which is (fairly well) optimized for what software actually needs to do. I can't think of many algorithms used by software today that would work much better in an FPGA, except for symmetric crypto. And if you need to do that, get an ASIC crypto chip, 10s of dollars for umpity gigs/second throughput. SPICE might also run a bit faster on these (understatement), but those types already have decent FPGA interfaces.

Furthermore, the processor programming these FPGAs must have some serious power... if you have to do many things on an FPGA at once (which you do if there are only 11 of them), you basically have to place & route on the fly, which is pretty slow.

So, I don't think that these "hypercomuters" will ever be any better than a traditional supercomputer in terms of price/performance, except for specialized applications. And even then, it won't be any better than an application specific setup. And not many people need to go back and forth between specialized tasks. (Who am I to complain of price/performance, I'm a Mac user?)

That said, if they *can* put a hypercomputer on everyone's desk for $1,000.00, more power to them!

Eeek!

[Snork Asaurus]

the systems got into race conditions were you had to use software to figure out the dynamic properties of the chip to see if two signals would arrive at the next gate in time to produce a stable response

Precisely one of the reasons that I shriek in horror when I hear that some hardware was 'designed' by a clever software guy. What you describe "figure out the dynamic ... stable response" (a.k.a. timing analysis) is not done in debugging - it is part of the design from square one, and is part of proper hardware design practices.

The fact that FPGA's are "programmable" does not move their development into the domain of software engineers.

A whole spectrum of skills is required to do proper hardware design (being a good 'logician' is only one of them) and FPGA's are raw hardware not finished product like a motherboard. Timing and many other 'real-world' factors that must be considered bore the hell of many 'logicians', but are critical to a reliable design.

A frightening number of Rube Goldberg machines exist out there that were designed by people who know something of logic and nothing of hardware design. I've had to redesign several of these "works only under ideal conditions but it's brilliant" pieces of junk.

Before you dismiss me as a hardware snob, let me tell you that I have spent many years both sides of the street and have dedicated my most recent 10 years to learning the art of good software design (there was supposed to *cough* be a bigger future in it). Each requires a set of skills and abilities that do intersect, but many of which exist entirely outside of that intersection. The fact that "logic" is one of the intersecting skills does not make a good hardware designer good at software nor does it make a good software designer good at hardware.