RECONFIGURABLE COMPUTING

A workshop at and after FPL'15 to engage the research community to identify and understand the issues that must be addressed to enable the use of reconfigurable arrays by mainstream software programmers... Reconfigurable computing, or the use of fabrics such as FPGAs to accelerate computing tasks normally run on conventional general-purpose processors, has been around almost as long as FPGAs themselves. Yet, very few FPGAs populate data centres, even less are on acceleration boards in our PCs, and none are in our laptops and tablets. We are now witnessing a new and exciting inflection point in the use of FPGAs: they are now being viewed as potentially viable commercial off-the-shelf components directly in the path of software developers. Microsoft recently revealed Catapult, a server with FPGAs soon to be in use in large data centres to accelerate their Bing search engine. Intel also announced a new compute node that will integrate an FPGA with a large Xeon multicore processor. These..