The Promise of Reconfigurable Computing and its Challenges: Can FPGAs (really) Become Mainstream, and How?

The relentless increase in capacity of Field-Programmable Gate-Arrays (FPGAs) has made them vehicles of choice for both prototypes and final products of on-chip multi-core, heterogeneous and reconfigurable systems. Their flexibility allows them to achieve orders of magnitude better performance than conventional computing systems via customization and in some context provide features that GPU-based solutions cannot offer. Programming these systems, however, is not an easy task, limiting their true potential. In this presentation we present some success stories of the used of FPGAs in mainstream computing. We will address the biggest programming challenge that they posse and discuss several avenues that make this techniques accessible to the average software programmer. The end of Moore’s law is forcing the research community and even industry to take a fresh look at this technology and a vehicle to provide high-performance and energy efficiency.