An overview of FPGAs and FPGA programming; initial experiences at Daresbury

This report will provide a brief introduction to Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the key reasons for their emergence into the High Performance Computing (HPC) market and the difficulties of assessing their performance against that of conventional microprocessors. It will also discuss FPGA programming tools and the key challenges involved in programming these devices. As well as providing some background information on FPGAs and FPGA programming this report will cover our initial experiences of FPGA programming with specific reference to the Cray XD1 system.