[geeks] SGI RASC - an interesting idea?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Oct 18, 2007, at 7:37 PM, Mark wrote:

> http://www.sgi.com/products/rasc/
>
> Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing. Basically you stack a
> server with boards with lots of RAM and pairs of FPGAs. You load the
> FPGAs with a specific gate set, use the hardware to process that job,
> then reprogram the FPGAs wit ha different gate set and process a
> different job. It's half way between application-specific hardware,
> and application software really. I thought the idea of software at
> hardware level was pretty neat - it certainly has the potential to be
> very fast.

Cool idea.  Similarly, you can get FPGA accelerators that will fit in  
Opteron sockets.

As long as any compiler for them (other than Matlab, maybe) is  
exotically priced, I think they will be of limited usefulness.   
Without being more accessible, they won't be able to get sufficient  
momentum behind them.