The CPU is getting lonely..

So it seems that the recent fashion for the CPU-knows-best is generally being re-thought; it's the return of the co-processor. While it makes sense, and at ngGrid we think it's compelling when using FPGAs in their sweet-spot, much of the coverage is somewhat lacking in depth.

In general the co-processors they speak of are GPUs (or possibly physics engines for games) but very little is mentioned of FPGAs, DSPs and the myriad of non-AMD/Intel/x86 hardware. In addition, while dropping another type of processor in a spare socket can give you a serious performance boost, I think this design shift could run into a while new architecture style. I don't think things are going to go all the way back to transputer's sea of processing elements (I think the granularity will still be quite chunky) it may finally bring some competition to the PC architecture. The PC standard is a huge hindrance to high performance computing in terms of hardware technology -- a cost which delivers amazingly cheap machines however.

Delivering the ability to innovate in architecture while remaining compatible with standard tools / binaries will be the key challenge going forward, in my opinion. Just dropping a single FPGA/GPU in a socket is not enough, you'll still want the local RAM (and lots of it) and associated IO in order to really jump ahead of homogeneous CPU architectures.

Another part of the equation missing, is real world experience and examples. While DRC and XtremeData have socket based FPGAs available today, I haven't seen much coverage of the benefits versus sitting on a PCI-foo bus. Of course, the lack of public FPGA successes in general is another matter altogether...

We're hiring...

... in London. We are looking for an FPGA engineer to join us in product development and also for consulting projects to our clients.

We are looking for an experienced reconfigurable computing engineer / developer, preferably with a mix of FPGA and software skills. We're not too fussy on specific languages or buzz words, we care more about experience, ability and attitude.

Since we're small company presently, the role will be fairly dynamic, so you can expect a mix of HDL coding (Verilog, VHDL, SystemC etc), software coding (anything from Python & Java to C++ or even assembly!), high level design, algorithm tuning, product design & client facing projects.

A "can do" attitude is the key skill to bring along, rigid roles and structures are not what we are about. Since we are targeting financial applications, a good maths background is needed but we don't expect you to know anything about the specifics of the algorithms.

If you're interested in finding out more, send an email with your CV to careers(at)nggrid.com.

A new FPGA blog...

Well, I felt it was time to start airing a few thoughts on the whole FPGA endeavour. I intend to write about a bunch of topics, anything from financial algorithms and implementation to FPGA tools and sector gossip. I'll probably throw in the odd CPU reference as well as other tenuously related snippets, such as notes on grid computing.