Numerous results in reconfigurable computing research suggest that FPGAs are able to deliver greatly improved performance or energy efficiency for many computationally demanding applications. This potential is being exploited by hyperscale cloud providers, which have recently deployed large scale installations with FPGA. In contrast, FPGAs have not had any significant impact on general purpose HPC installations so far. In this keynote, I will try to shed some light on the reasons for this development and the apparent gap between the promise and reality for FPGAs in HPC. I will discuss what the reconfigurable computing research community can and needs to provide to attract more interest from HPC users and suppliers. To highlight practical challenges, I will share some of our experiences at the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, where have recently commissioned two HPC testbed clusters with FPGAs and where we are currently planning to deploy FPGAs at a larger scale in our production HPC systems.
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