A Framework for Interfacing Configurable Hardware Accelerators

Do It Yourself Hardware Acceleration

by Ryan Scoville, Altera Corp., and Kevin Urban, XtremeData, Inc.

For all the benefits claimed by hardware acceleration, from exponential performance improvements to massive power and space savings, most of these benefits focus on what can be accomplished with little detail on how to accomplish it. Hardware acceleration always seems to have the implied acronym DIY (Do It Yourself).

Most of the time, this either means purchasing someone else's proprietary hardware and software, implementing algorithms at the far end of the system bus, and hoping that the partner's roadmap aligns with your evolving goals. Or it means developing your own boards, custom hardware, custom software, custom interfaces, and custom protocols while maintaining expertise in all of these fields. In this scenario, designers are not just taking advantage of hardware to accelerate their software; they are doing full hardware design, plain and simple.

These have been the obstacles of hardware acceleration for more than a decade and most software developers have found it best to ride Moore's Law of continual improvement, waiting for the next generation processor, rather than venturing into the realm of hardware acceleration.

As has been well publicized, the door to continual improvement has closed, however in turn this has opened the door to hardware acceleration. Hardware acceleration will look vastly different five years from now than it does today. For those who are not watching it closely, it will probably look different next month. Any acceleration path must not only be revolutionary in what it provides, it must also be evolutionary!

For the rest of the article, click here.