Reconfigurable special purpose hardware for scientific computation and simulation

Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are used to implement reconfigurable special purpose computing hardware for computationally intensive many-body problems in physics and mathematics. The inexpensive PC-based design environment used for this work is described, and the performance for several different problems of the resulting reconfigurable hardware is compared with that of some general purpose computers. The merits of using FPGAs in special purpose (SP) computational hardware are outlined. The problems are well represented by the Monte Carlo simulations of statistical and quantum physics and cellular automata simulations. The SP hardware, tackles two related classes of problems, one from cellular automata (Soliton Cellular Automata model) and one from the statistical physics of ferromagnetism