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ARC: a metacomputing environment for clusters augmented with reconfigurable hardware

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Abstract

The addition of reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs) to the nodes of Beowulf-style clusters has the potential to accelerate a variety of parallel applications through a combination of parallel programming and reconfigurable computing techniques. However, making efficient use of the computational resources available places a significant burden on the application developer due to the lack of support for reconfigurable computing and task heterogeneity in standard message-passing libraries. This paper describes Accessible Reconfigurable Computing (ARC), a metacomputing environment designed to address these issues. The architecture, implementation, and operation of the system are described in detail.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Philip D. Healy & John P. Morrison

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  1. Philip D. Healy
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  2. John P. Morrison
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Correspondence to Philip D. Healy.

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Healy, P.D., Morrison, J.P. ARC: a metacomputing environment for clusters augmented with reconfigurable hardware. J Supercomput 61, 743–779 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-011-0634-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-011-0634-0

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