Janus: An FPGA-Based System for High-Performance Scientific Computing

Author

Belletti, F. ; Cotallo, M. ; Cruz, Alberth ; Fernandez, L.A. ; Gordillo-Guerrero, A. ; Guidetti, M. ; Maiorano, A. ; Mantovani, F. ; Marinari, E. ; Martin-Mayor, V. ; Muoz-Sudupe, A. ; Navarro, D. ; Parisi, Giuseppe ; Perez-Gaviro, S. ; Rossi, Mattia ; Ru

Volume

11

Issue

1

fYear

2009

Firstpage

48

Lastpage

58

Abstract

Janus is a modular, massively parallel, and reconfigurable FPGA-based computing system. Each Janus module has one computational core and one host. Janus is tailored to, but not limited to, the needs of a class of hard scientific applications characterized by regular code structure, unconventional data-manipulation requirements, and a few Megabits database. The authors discuss this configurable system´s architecture and focus on its use for Monte Carlo simulations of statistical mechanics, as Janus performs impressively on this class of application.

Keywords

Monte Carlo methods; field programmable gate arrays; mathematics computing; scientific information systems; statistical mechanics; ubiquitous computing; FPGA-based system; Janus; Megabits database; Monte Carlo simulations; high-performance scientific computing; statistical mechanics; Application software; Biology computing; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Lattices; Monte Carlo methods; Parallel processing; Pervasive computing; Physics computing; Scientific computing; FPGA; Janus; Monte Carlo simulations; field-programmable gate array; scientific computing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computing in Science & Engineering

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1521-9615

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MCSE.2009.11

Filename

4720223