MPLEM: An 80-processor FPGA Based Multiprocessor System

Multiprocessor embedded systems (MESes) are a very promising approach for high performance yet relatively low-cost computing. At the same time modern FPGAs provide the silicon capacity to build multiprocessor systems containing 10-100 processors, complex memory systems, heterogeneous interconnection schemes and custom engines executing the performance-critical operations. In this work we present a MES implemented in a state-of-the-art FPGA consisting of up to eighty 32-bit processors. The efficiency of our approach is demonstrated by the fact that our system can execute the BLAST CPU-intensive application, which is the prevalent tool used by molecular biologists for DNA sequence matching and database search, many times faster than a simple PC.