The Promise of High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing

Abstract

Abstract

The Paramountcy of Reconfigurable Computing

“…FPGAs are supposed to be in 70% of all Embedded systems 228 . Introduced in 1984, fastest-growing segment of the semiconductor industry for about two decades, now a 4 billion US-$ world market (almost 30% increase from last year -Peter Clarke from iSuppli estimates 43%) FPGAs are a well proven technology rapidly heading for mainstream and also used in supercomputing by Cray, Silicon Graphics, and others 98,[241][242][243] . Estimations of the number of designers actively involved in FPGA design range from about 100,000 to over 500,000 engineers worldwide.…”

“…More recently, for instance, a factor of 3000 has been obtained in 3-D image processing for computer tomography. Biology showed speed-up factors 294 up to 8723 (Smith-Waterman pattern matching: Table 8) 98,295 . Multimedia reports up to 6000 (real-time face detection).…”

“…Cryptology reports for DES breaking a speed-up factor of 28514 96 (Table 8). Some of these speed-up studies report energy saving factors, like 3439 for the DES breaker example 98 . The same performance requires drastically less equipment.…”

“…In contrast to the currently still dominant von Neumann (vN) machine, Reconfigurable Computing [98][99][100][101] (RC), the second RAM-based machine paradigm, introduced in section 19.4, offers a drastic reduction of the electric energy budget and speedup factors by up to several orders of magnitude -compared to using the von Neumann paradigm, now beginning to lose its dominance [102][103] . Sections 19.5.4 and 19.6.2 stress the urgency of moving RC from niche to mainstream and urges, that we need a worldwide mass movement of a larger format than that of the VLSI design revolution around 1980, where only an urgently needed designer population has been missing [104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111][112][113][114][115][116][117] .…”

Software Engineering Techniques for the Development of Systems of Systems

“…Dynamic reconfiguration Systems of systems are required to adapt continually to changes in their environment, structure and objectives [6,26]. Recent advances in the study of dynamically reconfigurable software and hardware [19,23] provide promising approaches for the development of the computer systems to be incorporated into the systems of systems of the future.…”