Parallel Dedicated Hardware Devices for Heterogeneous Computations

We describe a design methodology which allows a fast design and prototyping of dedicated hardware devices to be used in heterogeneous computations. The platforms used in heterogeneous computations consist of a general-purpose COTS architecture which hosts a dedicated hardware device; parts of the computation are mapped onto the former, parts onto the latter, in a way to improve the overall computation efficiency. We report the design and the prototyping of a FPGA-based hardware board to be used in the search of low-autocorrelation binary sequences. The circuit has been designed by using a recently developed Parallel Hardware Generator (PHG) package which produces a synthesizable VHDL code starting from the specific algorithm expressed as a System of Affine Recurrence Equations (SARE). The performance of the realized devices has been compared to those obtained on the same numerical application on several computational platforms.