Re: Massively parallel FPGA systems

["Richard Loosemore" <rloosemore@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Dyke Stiles wrote:
> > Greetings -
> >
> > A company in Utah is bringing out a parallel number cruncher based on
> > FPGAs -
> > low cost and high performance are claimed.
> >
> >> Additional information on hypercomputers (hardware and software) is
> >> available at the Starbridge Systems web site:
>
> A *very* brief skim of one of the manuals suggests that they are very
> badly in need of something like CSP :-)
>
> Adrian
>

Don't anyone get too excited about massively parallel FPGA systems.  At
least, not from this outfit.

I was Director of Research at Starbridge Systems for a while, and I was the
one who tried to introduce them to the idea that they were badly in need of
something like CSP.  You won't find any mention of this in their
documentation because when I left in 2002, the Viva software still did not
really have the concept of a "variable," the floating point multiplication
was still too buggy to be usable, and if a programmer wanted to save
something to memory they had to explicitly program the timing signals to
control the DRAM chips.

How can I summarize the situation delicately?  Yes, they need CSP, but even
more urgently they need a phase change .... say, from vapor phase to solid
phase?

Richard Loosemore