Re: Massively parallel FPGA systems

[A E Lawrence <A.E.Lawrence@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Richard Loosemore wrote:
> > Dyke Stiles wrote:

> > > A company in Utah is bringing out a parallel number cruncher based on
> > > FPGAs -
> > > low cost and high performance are claimed.

> > A *very* brief skim of one of the manuals suggests that they are very
> > badly in need of something like CSP :-)
> >
> > Adrian

> 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?

You confirm exactly my quick impressions, but I didn't want to be too 
rude, and wasn't sure whether I had understood what they were doing!

Good to hear it from the horse's mouth! I wonder whether they have heard 
of Celoxica :-)

Adrian