High Productivity Computing System Based on FPGA and Its Application on Plasma Simulation

For computational intensive applications, effective and high performance computing capacity is of the most important. Besides the large scale parallel computers or supercomputers, small calculating arrays based on DSPs or FPGAs have become a reasonable selection for relatively lower cost circumstance. In this paper, we have developed a high productivity computing system (HPCS) based on FPGA. In this system, the HPCS computing unit (HCU) board uses two pieces of Altera StratixII 2S60/90/180 and can communicate with an optional host PC via PCI/PCI-x interface. The IEEE-754 compatible double precision floating point arithmetic IP package was realized to meet the computational requirements. Device drivers for the HCU board were written for both Linux and Windows OS. The HPCS has been applied to accelerate plasma simulation code called TRISTAN. When simulating 512 k particles, the result shows that the HPCS performs about 20 times faster than a Pentium-IV 2.8 GHz PC with 1 GB DDR memory.