Re: Request for increased awareness: Open Source FPGA acceleration
Hi Matus,
I sadly did not bring it with me (a bit of self-protection, those
devices are addictive) so I cannot demonstrate it live when we now meet.
Just to say something funny: In Germany they have just started selling
chocolate Santa Clauses, so why not getting one for Xmas similarly
prematurely? The small (sufficient for the principles) one costs about
as little as a two pints of beer in Norway.
Best,
Steffen
On 02/09/16 22:33, Matus Kalas wrote:
> Sounds really epic! I'm looking forward to check it out properly.
>
> Long live FPGAs! (Btw, aren't there any interesting news also about
> NoCs?)
> Matus
>
>
> On 2016-09-02 10:18, Steffen Möller wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Those who participated in our past Sprint in Lyngby have met Ruben. He
>> is the one who kindly packaged all that needed to be packaged for the
>> first and yet only completely Open Source toolchain for FPGA computing.
>> Details are on http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice .
>>
>> Ruben started that page which takes you by the hand to get some LEDs
>> blinking on a 20something $/€ device that attaches to your USB port. It
>> features a series of I/O ports to do just about anything or just compute
>> (i.e. accelerate) on the device itself. I got a "thank you for that
>> page"-email yesterday (Ruben started it, I just added some references).
>> It is about the first time this ever happened to me :o) Anyway, so it
>> seems like there is some accumulating momentum and people are kind of
>> uncertain about what to do. I tell you: There is no risk in spending
>> those 25 $/€, which actually should be some 80 $/€ for a better
>> performing 8K device. While I have little doubt that both for Xilinx and
>> Altera we will also see something evolving in the near future (anybody
>> tried to get a free webpack license for the only Spartan-6 compatible
>> older ISE tools? something needs to happen on that front). The
>> yosys/arachne-pnr/icetools packages of the free pipeline instantaneously
>> sky rocketed to almost 140 users.
>>
>> Anyway - I think we are on the forefront of a significant movement here.
>> This combination of free programming tools and cheap devices for
>> programmable hardware is completely new. Please keep your eyes and ears
>> open. There are closed-source implementations of Smith-Waterman on FPGA
>> out there, not so much on BLAST. Those first devices do not have the
>> memory to help much with accelerating sequence comparison - the usb port
>> is too lame and there is not enough memory on the device to keep the
>> data. But this is all just a matter of time. Hack along! And maybe make
>> some noise with your engineers on site for whom a PCI/USB3 card with
>> such an FPGA and a couple of gigs of memory on board is likely little
>> more than a master thesis away.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Steffen
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