Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Stanford talk on accelerating computation with FPGAs, 13May09

[Marcus D. Leech]

John Gilmore wrote:
> [The Maxeler website seems almost entirely devoid of any technical info. 
> --gnu]
>
>               Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium
>                   4:15PM, Wednesday, May 13, 2009
>          HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01
>                     http://ee380.stanford.edu[1]
>
> Topic:    Accelerating computation with FPGAs
>            with a seismic computation example
>
> Speaker:  Michael Flynn
>            Maxeler Technologies (and Stanford)
>
> About the talk:
>
> For many high performance applications the alternative to the
> multicore rack is to use an accelerator assist to each multicore
> node. There are a number of instances of these accelerators:
> GPGPU, Specialized processors (E.G.IBM's Cell) and FPGAs.
>
> At Maxeler we've found that the FPGA array technology wins out on
> performance for most relevant applications. Given the initial
> area-time-power disadvantage of the FPGA in (say) a custom
> designed adder this is a surprising result. The sheer magnitude
> of the available FPGA parallelism overcomes the initial
> disadvantage.
>
>   
I'll have to check out the archived version of this after it happens.

I'm a bit of a fence-sitter on using FPGAs for SDR.  At what point does
it become Hardware Defined Radio again?  But I suppose
  that with a good compiler, and FPGAs that can be re-programmed a large
number of times, it counts as SDR :-)

I'd love to be able to compute wide-band total-power and *insanely-huge*
FFTs as fast as the A/Ds will go.  That isn't going to
  happen with a garden-variety compute platform in the next four years. 
But a parallelized FFT inside an FPGA(s) or
  a GPGPU could likely tackle this without breaking into a sweat....

-- 
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator, Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortium
http://www.sbrac.org