Splash 2

This book describes the Splash 2 computing system as designed and
built at the Supercomputing Research Center. This is a novel
attached processor using Xilinx 4010 FPGAs as its processing
elements and whose application programming language is VHDL. This
is the first publication that details the complete Splash 2 project
-- the hardware and software systems, the architecture and their
implementations, and the design process by which the architecture
evolved from an earlier version machine. This text allows you to
understand why the machine has been engineered in the way it has.
In addition to the description of the machine, several applications
are described in detail, permitting the reader to gain an
understanding of the capabilities and the limitations of this kind
of computing device.

The Splash 2 program is significant for two reasons. First, Splash
2 is part of a complete computer system that achieves supercomputer
like performance on a number of different applications. The second
significant aspect is that this large system is capable of
performing real computations on real problems. In order to
understand what happens when the application programmer is
permitted to design the processor architecture of the machine that
execute his programs, it is necessary to see the system as a whole.
This book looks in-depth at one of the handful of data points in
the design space of this new kind of machine.