FPGA supercomputing platforms: A survey

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) inherent reconfigurable nature and their low power consumption have made them so complementary to microprocessors that many are advocating their inclusion in all supercomputing clusters. Today FPGAs are included in few mainstream computer systems for accelerating application specific performance. Among the numerous areas in reconfigurable computing FPGA have been encroaching into, we focus our literature review mainly on the area of high performance computing. Moving from FPGA general features to the evolution of FPGA supercomputing architecture, its roadmap, we reference selected applications lately developed for accelerating large simulation tasks using FPGA based supercomputers before presenting concluding remarks on challenges yet to be overcome.