Integration of a multi-FPGA system in a common cluster environment

Heterogeneous systems consisting of general-purpose processors and different types of hardware accelerators are becoming more and more common in HPC systems. Especially Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide an energy-efficient way to achieve high performance. Numerous application areas, including bio- and neuroinformatics, require enormous processing capabilities and employ simple computation cores. These elementary data structures are highly suitable for FPGAs. To allow an efficient use of distributed FPGAs, we introduce a simple and scalable integration of the FPGAs in a common cluster architecture to permit an easy access to these resources.