Re: Massively parallel FPGA systems

["Roger Peel" <R.Peel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> Now that Starbridge has been panned - 
> 
> Does anybody out there know any massively parallel single-die chips
> made of huge numbers of identical little CPUs? In reality, in
> vaporware, in patents, or a glimmer in someone's eye... I don't
> mean any wimpy 64, I mean thousands. Starting from the fact that
> newest Pentium has over 100 million transistors, and a perfectly
> good CPU of the 1980s can be made with 40,000.
> 
> They are interested at work, so please send any Windows-style
> attachments to my work address (ldickson@xxxxxxxxxxx) as this
> ancient ISP can't deal with them.
> 
> Larry Dickson

Larry,

Back in 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation built a multi-FPGA
machine capable of cracking Data Encryption Standard keys (See
http://www.eff.org/descracker/).  This machine ran 64 cracking
processes per FPGA - although whether these qualified as "little CPUs"
is debatable.  (see http://www.itsecurity.com/papers/crackdes6.htm)

Using current FPGA technology, thousands of processes per chip should
be possible.  

I'm still working on a compiler that takes Occam/CSP and targets FPGAs,
with the specification and implementation of transputer-like CPUs as
one major goal, so I would be interested in your applications of a
multi-processor FPGA.  Interestingly, the internals of a CPU appear
quite difficult to specify efficiently in a CSP-like language, and also
quite difficult to implement in FPGA [think "shared data bus" in both
cases].

Roger.