LAMP: a tool suite for families of FPGA-based computational accelerators

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are becoming increasingly attractive as computation engines: they are currently being integrated into supercomputers as application accelerators. In order for widespread use of FPGA-based accelerators to be practical, however, design tools must resolve a number of conflicting needs: application-specific tuning versus wide applicability, stability of software investment versus use of the most recent and powerful acceleration hardware, and customization of complex computing structures by end users who lack logic design skills. We describe how the LAMP tools address these conflicts and report performance results from experiments in creating families of application accelerators.