Case studies in determining the optimal field programmable gate array design for computing highly parallelisable problems

Reconfigurable hardware has recently shown itself to be an appropriate solution to speeding up problems that are highly dependent on a particular complex or repetitive sub-algorithm. In most cases, these types of solutions lend themselves well to parallel solutions. The optimal design on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for problems with algorithms or sub-algorithms that can be highly parallelised is investigated. In addition, a classification system is introduced, which categorises FPGA-based solutions into ´instance-specific´ and ´parameter-specific´.