FPGA Journal: Saving Supercomputing with FPGAs - What We'll Do When We Hit the Wall

Massive racks of parallel processing Pentiums, Opterons, and Itaniums wasted watts at an unprecedented pace last week on the show floor at Supercomputing 2005 in Seattle. Teraflops, terabytes, and terrifying network bandwidths bombarded booth attendees looking for the last word in maximizing computational throughput. Convention center air conditioning worked overtime purging the byproducts of billions of bit manipulations per second as breaker boxes burst at the seams, straining to deliver adequate amperage to simultaneously power and cool what was probably the world’s largest temporary installation of high-performance computing equipment.