A flow solver for a reconfigurable FPGA-based hypercomputer

This paper details initial efforts to program a basic, compressible flow solver on a reconfigurable fleld-programmable-gate-array- (FPGA) based computer manufactured by Star Bridge Systems, Inc. An FPGA is an array of Silicon gates on a computer chip that can be reconfigured by programmers in the field for specific problems. In addition to the dynamic nature of FPGA hardware (which enables optimization to specific applications), FPGAs are also inherently parallel. This enables programmers to make as many operations run concurrently as they can physically fit on the FPGA, using its resources more efficiently than is possible on a CPU. Basic object like vectors and matrices and their corresponding operations like dot-product, matrix-vector and matrix-matrix multiplication were implemented. These basic components were then used to build a one-dimensional, explicit compressible flow solver.