The Splash 2 software environment

Splash 2 is an attached special purpose parallel processor in which the computing elements are user programmable FPGA devices. The architecture of Splash 2 is designed to accelerate the solution of problems which exhibit at least modest amounts of temporal or data parallelism. Applications are developed by writing behavioral descriptions of algorithms in VHDL, which are then iteratively refined and debugged within the Splash 2 simulator. Once an application is determined to be functionally correct in simulation, it is compiled to a gate list and optimized by logic synthesis. The gate list is then mapped onto the FPGA architecture by automatic placement and routing tools to form a loadable FPGA object module. A C language library and a symbolic debugger comprise the execution environment. The Splash 2 system has been shown to be effective on a variety of applications, including text searching, sequence analysis, and image processing