January 12, 2007 -- HPC programmers are evaluating alternative accelerators to boost the performance of their applications. When looking at FPGAs, they are confronted with an array of new terminologies and concepts that can be difficult to understand at first. This article will walk the HPC programmer through understanding double precision (64-bit) floating-point performance of the Xilinx Virtex-4 LX200 and Virtex-5 LX330 FPGAs and compares them to the performance of a 2.5 GHz, dual-core Opteron processor.
By Dave Strenski. (Strenski is an Application Analyst with Cray, Inc.)
This brief introduction has been excerpted from the original copyrighted article.
