Reconfigurable special purpose hardware for scientific computation and simulation

Author

Monaghan, S. ; Noakes, P.D.

Author_Institution

Centre for VLSI Syst. Design, Essex Univ., Colchester, UK

Volume

3

Issue

5

fYear

1992

fDate

9/1/1992 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

225

Lastpage

234

Abstract

Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are used to implement reconfigurable special purpose computing hardware for computationally intensive many-body problems in physics and mathematics. The inexpensive PC-based design environment used for this work is described, and the performance for several different problems of the resulting reconfigurable hardware is compared with that of some general purpose computers. The merits of using FPGAs in special purpose (SP) computational hardware are outlined. The problems are well represented by the Monte Carlo simulations of statistical and quantum physics and cellular automata simulations. The SP hardware, tackles two related classes of problems, one from cellular automata (Soliton Cellular Automata model) and one from the statistical physics of ferromagnetism

Keywords

Monte Carlo methods; cellular automata; digital simulation; ferromagnetism; firmware; logic arrays; many-body problems; physics computing; reconfigurable architectures; solitons; special purpose computers; Monte Carlo simulations; PC-based design environment; SRAM; Soliton Cellular Automata model; Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays; cellular automata simulations; ferromagnetism; many-body problems; reconfigurable hardware; reconfigurable special purpose computing hardware;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computing & Control Engineering Journal

Publisher

iet

ISSN

0956-3385

Type

jour

Filename

166930