Planning Ahead
Xilinx Updates Hierarchical Design Tool

It's a cold February morning in a well-hidden corner of Silicon Valley. The air is perfectly still. The sun is just rising above the hills, although it isn't clearly visible through the dissipating ground fog cast over the region by the bay. There is a light frost on the grass, even though the temperature has been in the 40s all night. That's one of the big issues with fictional, metaphoric introductions to technical articles – continuity problems. These things clearly would never stand up to an engineering design review.

Any moment now, Silicon Valley Stan, the timing-closure groundhog, will emerge from his burrow. He'll whip out his smart-phone, maybe check the stock reports, listen to a couple of voicemails from his boss about the embedded software project falling behind schedule, start downloading his daily podcasts, and then step out of the threshold into the light. This, of course, is the moment of truth. If the angles and locations are just right, if the sun has penetrated the fog, if the route he follows on his way to work happens to follow just the right path – he may see his shadow. If he does, we'll have six more weeks of timing-closure problems, iterations through synthesis and place-and-route, changing RTL and constraints, moving I/O locations - all in a futile bid to foil the random hand of fate.
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Reconfigurable Computing in Real-World Applications
by Steve Margerm, Cray, Inc.

Developers have long been intrigued by the potential of reconfigurable computing (RC) to accelerate some computationally-intensive high-performance computing (HPC) applications. But the barriers to achieving the order-of-magnitude performance gains RC can theoretically provide are well known: the complexity of programming for RC devices and the limitations of the hardware and software traditionally used to support them. As a result, software developers have focused on fine tuning applications to run faster on standard microprocessors, and have achieved important percentage gains.

Now, emerging systems like the Cray XD1 are bringing RC application acceleration into the real world and laying the groundwork to make order of magnitude performance gains a reality. At Cray, we wanted to see just how far we could push this technology.
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