SYSTEMS

Four members of NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory -- Volodymyr Kindratenko, David Pointer, David Raila, and Craig Steffen -- have produced a white paper on issues in "Comparing CPU and FPGA Application Performance." Through the Innovative Systems Laboratory, NCSA partners with domain scientists to explore emerging system architectures. One technology being investigated is high-performance reconfigurable computing (HPRC) -- the combination of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with traditional CPU systems. As part of this investigation, the researchers have had to address the issue of how to quantify an application's performance on both a traditional CPU and on a CPU-FPGA system. The white paper describes the metric they employ, which includes both FPGA overhead and FPGA computation time -- and the reasoning behind this choice. To read this white paper and others, go to its Web site.