FPGA Supercomputers

olafva writes: "You may be interested in this new breakthrough! See NASA Press Release and a couple of today's local stories for a remarkable paradigm shift in "Computing Faster without CPUs"." CmdrTaco said he'd believe it when he saw it. Well, they've got pictures. (Update: 03/29 5:02 PM by michael : At NASA's request, we've modified the links in the above story to reduce the load on their Public Affairs website. The same content is at the new links.)

Re:FPGA?

Hey - spend some time at Tom's Hardware Page!

An FPGA is a combination hardware/software device. If you passed that Digital Circuit Design class back in college, you remember that you can implement a 20-bit divider using - what - 84 NOR gates or something like that? There are orders of magnitude more gates in these devices, and orders of magnitude more complicated tasks can be accomplished.

You write a 'program' as a collection of declarative statements from the "Predicate Calculus" around the internal structure of input and output pins, and the FGPG compiler figures out which "gates" to "program" in the "field".

As the number of gates, intermediate terms, inputs, and outputs has grown, so has the complexity of the expressions, thus programs, that these puppies can handle.

Other groups working on similar stuff

There are a lot of groups working on similar stuff:

http://www.ccm.ece.vt.edu/acs_api [vt.edu] - This is my group and I apologize for the lame web page.

http://splish.ee.byu.edu [byu.edu] These guys do very good work, especially when it comes to hardware description languages.

http://www.east.isi.edu/projects/SLAAC/ [isi.edu] We like these people too.

http://www.annapmicro.com [annapmicro.com] A lot of our graduates go here.

There are several more groups - you can find a more complete list on the People section of ISI's web site.

Smoke and mirrors?

This FPGA-reprogramming trick came up about a year or so ago. If I recall correctly, the company involved has as its star actors, a couple of high-power intellectual property attorneys, and a huckster of sorts that has a patent on a reprogrammable audio mixer console, using similar technology. The company at the time was begging old, cast-off FPGAs from Altera, et al, so they could 'prototype' a few boards covered with hundreds of FPGAs, so they could show these around to various companies, and raise some venture capital. The only information available on their web site was a pitch aimed at folks with more money than wits, to invest in their company.

The important things to note:

1) Even though you can reprogram an FPGA in about a millisecond, the logistics of getting all the right programs to all the right FPGAs on a very dense board is left as an exercise to the reader (hint -- it is not a simple walk in the park).

2) Even though you can reprogram an FGPA in about a millisecond (yielding the claimed 1000 times a second machine re-configuration), it takes many minutes (sometimes hours) for the typical VHDL or similar program to produce the code that you will want to download to those FPGAs. And, of course, if you want disimmilar loads for various groupings of those chips, you will need to repeat the above with feeling, over and over, and over.

3) This particular company was crowing about their patented graphical programming language last year, and also didn't have anything real to show. In other words, no one had actually seen them push buttons, and have this magical language actually produce runnable code for all those FPGA's to do anything useful.

As near as I can tell, this whole thing is based on some guy's idea of raising money so he can drive fast cars, etc, etc. What really hurts is seeing NASA geeting sucked into this black hole...

The Nasa Press Realease

NewsRelease
National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
Langley Research Center
Hampton, Virginia 23681-2199

Bill Uher
NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.
[phone]

For Release: March 26, 2001
For those you can read the Word Document

RELEASE NO. 01-021

NASA Langley to test New Hyper Computer System
Computing Faster Than Engineers Can Think

NASA Langley engineers are exploring new tools and techniques that may move them and the projects they develop beyond the serial world into a parallel universe.

Via a Space Act Agreement, NASA Langley Research Center will receive a HAL (Hyper Algorithmic Logic)-15 Hypercomputer from Star Bridge Systems, Inc. of Midvale, Utah. The system is said to be faster and more versatile than any supercomputer on the market and will change the way we think about computational methods.

Taking up no more space than a standard desktop computer and using no more electrical current than an hair drier, the HAL-15 is the first of a new breed of high performance computer that replaces the traditional central processing units with faster Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These are specialty chips on a circuit board that can reconfigure themselves hundreds or thousands of times a second. This makes it possible for multiple applications to run at the same time on the same chips making them 1000 times faster than traditional commercial CPUs. This maximizes the use of millions of transistors (gates) on each silicon array. Traditional processors, because of their general purpose design, are wasteful, since for most applications they use only a small fraction of their silicon at any time.

HAL is programmed graphically using the company?s proprietary programming language, VIVA. This language facilitates rapid custom software development by the system?s users. Besides NASA Langley, other users will include the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Department of Defense, Hollywood film industry and the telecommunications industry.

-more-

NASA Langley is among the first in the world to get ?hands on? experience with the new system. It will be implemented to explore:
-Solutions for structural, electromagnetic and fluid analysis
-Radiation analysis for astronaut safety
-Atmospheric science analysis
-Digital signal processing
-Pattern recognition
-Acoustic analysis

Media Briefing: A media briefing will be held at 9 a.m., Tuesday, March 27, at the Pearl Young Theater Newsroom, Bldg. 1202, 5 North Dryden Street at NASA Langley Research Center. There will be a news briefing and short demonstration at 9 am followed by a demonstration and discussion for scientists and engineers. HAL developer Kent Gilson and Star Bridge Systems, Inc. CEO Brent Ward will conduct the demonstration. Two Langley researchers, Dr. Robert Singletarry and Dr. Olaf Storaasli, trained on the new system and will report on their first-hand experiences with the hypercomputer.

-end-

So we learn a new skill

Somebody with years of experience in traditional programming probably won't find their skills translate too easily. The investment in layers of abstraction built on traditional processors is too big ever to throw away, but this kind of a machine is a nifty trick to have available.

It is extremely cool to have this technology emerging. As for our years of skills translating, or not, it isn't really all the important. We will simply learn how to program this new equipment, from scratch if necessary.

It is a myth that the young learn better than the less-young. As an example, I learned German at 21 (and am now very fluent), Linux at 26, how to fly a plane at 33, and am now learning to write screenplays at 36. (As an amusing counterpoint I will almost certainly never learn to spell, even at 60. Not because I cannot, but because I have better things to do with my time, and a spell checker when absolutely necessary, but most of all, because I take perverse pleasure in yanking the grammar nazis' chains). While I doubt I'll be performing any airshows, or attending the Oscars, anytime soon, the point remains: we have already been taught how to think and learn. Learning how to use and program FPGAs won't be that big of a problem, with or without years of programming experience behind us.

programming FPGAs is different

Programming a bunch of FPGAs (essentially an ocean of gates and flipflops) is necessarily pretty different from programming a general purpose sequential computer. It's interesting to see Star Bridge's thoughts [starbridgesystems.com] on this, and why they're optimistic about this approach.

The VIVA project was initiated several years ago to bring high-level computer language capability to FPGA programming and to take advantage of the massively parallel capabilities of FPGAs. FPGAs are cheap to make, much cheaper than complex microprocessors such as the Intel Pentium III. The yield rate is higher because the deposition densities are much more uniform for FPGAs than for microprocessors. Furthermore, the entire chip surface can be dedicated to usable transistors, with the potential to provide orders of magnitude more computing capability on the same size chip.

They go on to describe a hierarchical GUI that connects functional block to make bigger functional blocks. Somebody with years of experience in traditional programming probably won't find their skills translate too easily. The investment in layers of abstraction built on traditional processors is too big ever to throw away, but this kind of a machine is a nifty trick to have available.

Probably only faster for simple operations

I couldn't read the press release (MS Word - bah), but judging from the websites, the FPGA is dynamically programmed to perform very specific tasks in hardware.

Since these specific tasks can run in hardware, they will run 1000 times faster than a Pentium. There is no way in the world this machine is going to run general purpose applications at this speed. Only very specific, small, algorithms. Sorry, no 6000 fps for Quake ;-)

This makes the machine useless for everyday use in your home. However, I agree this machine may be very usefull for flight-control computers.

Nice usage scenario.

From the Daily Press coverage: "People could hook into central hypercomputers to run their entire households -- from the coffee pot to the television set, the shower to the garage door"

Yeah, that's exactly what springs to my mind when I try to come up with uses for a supercomputer the size of a PC. To run my coffee pot.
Finally I can actually make coffee at home; I've always wondered how they ran the coffee pot at 7-11 - where I buy all my coffee - but now I know: They use a supercomputer!

Re:Press release

One would have thought that the natural format to choose for a press release on a web site would be HTML, just like the rest of the web site it is hosted on. That way, 100% of the world's Internet users, who are the only ones that will be able to retrieve the file, will be able to read it, regardless of the operating systems and user software they choose to install and/or pay for.

Further, most of the 95% of the World that you believe use MS Word are not the people that will have any interest in reading about this. The people who are interested are mainly scientists and engineers, two groups who tend to be more likely than average to use a platform other than a PC running some version of Windows. These guys are more likely to write things in LaTeX than Word. But they will have an equal chance with everyone else of being able to read HTML.

I certainly don't have any software installed on my system that can read Word files. I know of several programs that could do an aproximate conversion, but why should I install extra software, using my time and computing resources, to read this, when its not even close to the format that any reasonable person would have expected it to be in anyway?

WOW!! Joint NASA/Sony Announcement!!!

So, NASA makes this announcement, and Sony goes right around and announces that they have been working closely with NASA to develop the Playstation 5 based on this technology. The PS5 which begat the Playstation 4 developed by the NSA which begat the Playstation 3 developed by IBM's super computer division will allow the game player to control the console from any NASA station in the world! Imagine playing Tekken Tag Tournament Hyper Z 2K10 Script Kiddie Edition with the folks on the International Space Station! From all that I have read, I think I will have to wait for the PS5 instead of the PS4 and PS3. Thanks Sony marketing engine!!!!!!!

Bryan R.

Re:All I know will be useless!

Of course, but this is actually easy to do. I remember taking a VLSI design course (based on the Carver Mead/Lynn Conway book) back in college around 1980 and designing a "memory cell" with a built-in comparator that could swap the contents with the neighboring cell.... the "sort algorithm" then consists of loading the memory and clocking it N times! :-)

Re:Press release

Well I would have taken a look at the press release... if it wasn't in fscking MS Word format. Sigh.

Abiword [abisource.com] runs on just about any platform you can use on a PC and reads MS Word files pretty well. It reads this press release just fine.

Steve

Not NAND but LUT

I'm a programmer at Xilinx working on an internal tool our IP developers use, and I have to say that that's not how FPGAs work. The boards have flipflops and LUTs (Look Up Tables) in a regular matrix; the LUTs hold 16 values and act essentially as truth tables indexed by 4 inputs. Hence they can imitate any gate with the same number of inputs, be it XOR or NAND or any other gate (or even some combination of 2-input gates which has 4 inputs and a single output). This is, of course, a very simplified explanation, but the principle is the same even with the more advanced FPGAs.

'Gates' figures on FPGAs are thus rough estimates of how many NAND gates would be needed to provide similar functionality.

Savant

Re:This just in...

Naw, if NASA really wanted to screw with the SETI@Home crowd they could plant some false positives.

Re:programming FPGAs... It's not that hard

They go on to describe a hierarchical GUI that connects functional block to make bigger functional blocks. Somebody with years of experience in traditional programming probably won't find their skills translate too easily.

In my digital logic class in university we had FPGA boards from Altera in the lab. To program them, you defined your components in VHDL, then connected them in a GUI that resembled that of any other visual object-oriented IDE (which I admittedly don't use). If you want the output of one component to feed into the input of another component, you just draw a line between them. This is not difficult. From this GUI you can easily pull up the VHDL description of any component and edit it if you need to. Reading the 'Programming VIVA' section on Star Bridge's homepage [starbridgesystems.com], they're environment is remarkably similar. Trust me: if some of the folks in my class could make things work in this kind of environment, no programmer worth the name should have any difficulty adapting...

Re:Smoke and mirrors?

I don't know anything about this company, so I'll have to take your word for it. But I don't think this is as implausible as you make it sound.

I'm assuming that what they're planning is to have a sort of standard library of FPGA loads for different functions, and programmers will write programs by picking the right loads for each device group. This, no doubt, is what that special language is for, so that programmers won't have to understand all the gory details in order to write code for it. Any custom loads that need to be created will be synthesized at compile time; compilation will be slow, but the run-time can be fast.

Admittedly, programming all those individual FPGAs on the fly is a complex and difficult task, but then, I doubt that most programs will be reconfiguring so often in the real world. Their 1000/s number is a maximum, and may not apply when you're trying to program multiple loads into multiple devices.

Re:Probably only faster for simple operations

"Since these specific tasks can run in hardware, they will run 1000 times faster than a Pentium. There is no way in the world this machine is going to run general purpose applications at this speed. Only very specific, small, algorithms. Sorry, no 6000 fps for Quake ;-)"

Humm.. 1000 times faster, 6000fps in Quake with this, do you really mean to imply that you only get 6fps in Quake with current technology? :)

This just in...

NASA's SETI@Home team has unexpectedly jumped ahead of all other teams, with 3.74 billion work units processed over the last three days. A NASA spokesperson has been quoted as saying "Up yours, Sun Micro!"

Imagine...

... a Beowulf cluster of these. *punch* *ow* *sorry, sorry!* *ow*

Re:How does this differ from my CPU?

Absolutely. You don't have to recompile the code everytime you want to turn on an FPGA system. With Xilinx FPGAs, you store the object code in a reprogrammable PROM and on power-up, the FPGA just reads the PROM to find out what it's supposed to do. Altera chips integrate the PROM and keep their programming when turned off so they startup faster.

Re:Coming soon to a bedroom near you?

"why aren't we all ditching our amd's/pentiums and buying one of these little babies?"
A) It's only faster on certain problems where the computations can be performed massively in parallel. And most CPU's already spend 99% of their time waiting for data to arrive from memory or the hard drive, or for the operator to click the mouse.

B) It's a s-o-b to program. You aren't writing software, you are designing a custom hardware circuit to solve the problem, which is then implemented by programming logic gates and connections in the chips. In other words, on a computing job where you could write a program in C in a week and it would run in 1 minute on a PC, on FPGA's it might take a year to design and run in a millisecond. So if reducing the run time is worth paying six figures for software development, go for it... Maybe the HAL people have found a way to ease the programming, but it's still going to be quite a lot harder than normal programming.

Just guessing this box might hold 100 FPGA's at $25 each. Plus it has to have a normal computer in there to hand the programs and data out to the FPGA's. So it costs more than a PC, but maybe not as much as a top-end workstation (depending on how big a profit margin they are taking). It's great for a rocket navigational system, but the only down to earth applications I can think of for a machine this big are professional video processing, weather prediction, and some really heavy engineering simulations.

On a smaller scale, cell phones and future modems are likely to include some FPGA-like circuits, probably as a small part of a custom chip rather than as a separate FPGA. When a new protocol comes out requiring revised circuit design, you do the changes in the FPGA program and distribute it to be downloaded.

No government could stop this; FPGA's are sold worldwide and used extensively for prototyping and occasionally for production. Maybe they'll try to restrict the HAL programming language.

alternative home heating?

"It uses no more energy than a hair dryer" That is 1500 watts. My apartment is small enough that I would have to keep the windows open in the wintertime to keep from roasting in here...

Things too Note!!

I attended the press briefing. First I would like to note that the presentor was a very likable guy who was open to questions and very knowledgeable. He had an example with the HAL computer calculating the Julian set vs. a PIII 850. The difference was amazing. You could zip around the set on the HAL, where the PIII kinda skipped around about 1/3 fps. Finally the price that was quoted 1 millllion dolllars!!! Worth it?? Time will tell.

Modded Funny

Ya gotta love it when someone quotes the press release verbatim and it gets modded "funny."