Hardware acceleration prospects and challenges for high performance computing

High performance computing (HPC) has often benefited from special-purpose hardware. This paper examines the potential roles for several different approaches to hardware acceleration that are currently being deployed in HPC systems. Because each technology has different performance characteristics, as well as practical considerations (such as electrical consumption, physical interface, and cost), a match of these characteristics to the desired HPC workload is desirable. Technologies discussed include multicore processors, chip multithreading, graphics processing units, field-programmable gate arrays, cell processors, and vector processors.