[Beowulf] Register article on AMD OCP motherboards

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

On 5/15/13 7:44 AM, "Hearns, John" <john.hearns at mclaren.com> wrote:

>>> but we will be using the highest capacity commodity systems - which are
>>> likely to be something like these cloud/virtualisation platforms.
>>> Sorry if this thought is a bit muddled.
>
>> but there's nothing new about these systems!
>
>Point taken.
>
>The tiny proto-mammals are already of course running about under the feet
>of the dinosaurs,
>with their wimpy processor hot-blooded bodies and their FPGA whiskers.
>
>Time for Beowulf to grow some feathers.
>
>


There are people looking at clusters of FPGAs, with processors either
instantiated in the FPGA logic, or part of the fabric (e.g. PowerPC cores
in Xilinx FPGAs).


However, you pay a power penalty for FPGA vs the same computation in "non
reprogrammable logic" (e.g. An ASIC).  I don't know that this is a
fundamental limitation.. You probably can't make a FPGA cell as small as a
ASIC cell, though.


>From the Beowulf standpoint, though, I don't know if there's anything that
could be called a "commodity" FPGA platform that has consumer prices.

>