The (empty?) Promise of FPGA Supercomputing

Abstract

There have been some notable success stories in the past that give merit to the viability of the creation of an FPGA-based supercomputer. When examining the computing potential of these devices, they appear to offer competitive computational characteristics that are highly competitive to contemporary high-performance processors. Recently, there have been supercomputer-class processing blades offered by the leading high-performance computing specialist, yet the sales of these nodes have been less than spectacular. This talk examines why this may be the case, and explores the viability and cost-performance of FPGA-based supercomputers