Advances and challenges of computing with FPGAs

The primary challenges in reconfigurable computing relate to ease of use. The usual approach to mapping an application for execution on an FPGA has been equivalent to laborious RTL design. The research presented in this talk will highlight our experimentation with techniques for improving the ease of use of reconfigurable devices on a variety of fronts and for a wide range of computing tasks. This research has been driven by a few major application areas, including tasks in computer system simulation and a set of compute intensive tasks drawn from signal processing in radio astronomy and data-processing in systems biology.