An Accelerator for Physics Simulations

Author

Danese, Giovanni ; Leporati, Grancesco ; Bera, Marco ; Giachero, Mauro ; Nazzicari, Nelson ; Spelgatti, Alvaro

Author_Institution

Univ. of Pavia, Pavia

Volume

9

Issue

5

fYear

2007

Firstpage

16

Lastpage

25

Abstract

An accelerator based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology accelerates double-precision floating-point operations present in the energy calculation of Monte Carlo-Metropolis simulations. The accelerator uses COTS components and is scalable in terms of clock frequency, memory capability, and number of computing units. It could also be part of a cluster of accelerated workstations.

Keywords

Monte Carlo methods; digital simulation; field programmable gate arrays; floating point arithmetic; physics computing; workstation clusters; COTS; Monte Carlo-Metropolis simulations; accelerator; clock frequency; energy calculation; field-programmable gate array; floating-point operations; memory capability; physics simulations; workstation cluster; Acceleration; Application software; Circuit simulation; Clocks; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Physics computing; Workstations; Monte Carlo dynamics; gate arrays; instruction set design; parallel processors;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Computing in Science & Engineering

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1521-9615

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MCSE.2007.94

Filename

4293731