EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems 
Volume 2007 (2007), Article ID 93652, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/2007/93652
Research Article

Examining the Viability of FPGA Supercomputing

Stephen Craven and Peter Athanas

 Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg 24061, VA, USA
Received 16 May 2006; Revised 6 October 2006; Accepted 16 November 2006

Recommended by Marco Platzner

Abstract

For certain applications, custom computational hardware created using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can produce significant performance improvements over processors, leading some in academia and industry to call for the inclusion of FPGAs in supercomputing clusters. This paper presents a comparative analysis of FPGAs and traditional processors, focusing on floating-point performance and procurement costs, revealing economic hurdles in the adoption of FPGAs for general high-performance computing (HPC).