Radio-Astronomical Imaging: FPGAs vs GPUs

FPGAs excel in performing simple operations on high-speed streaming data, at high (energy) efficiency. However, so far, their difficult programming model and poor floating-point support prevented a wide adoption for typical HPC applications. This is changing, due to recent FPGA technology developments: support for the high-level OpenCL programming language, hard floating-point units, and tight integration with CPU cores. Combined, these are game changers: they dramatically reduce development times and allow using FPGAs for applications that were previously deemed too complex.