Trident: From High-Level Language to Hardware Circuity.

The article discusses the computer program Trident and how it can be used to aid reconfigurable supercomputing. Traditionally, reconfigurable supercomputers used field-programmable gate arrays alongside high-performance microprocessors in clusters. More recently, floating-point libraries, computatio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Computer (00189162) Vol. 40; no. 3; pp. 28 - 35
Main Authors: Tripp, Justin L., Gokhale, Maya B., Peterson, Kristopher D.
Format: Article
Published: IEEE Mar2007
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Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Description
Summary:The article discusses the computer program Trident and how it can be used to aid reconfigurable supercomputing. Traditionally, reconfigurable supercomputers used field-programmable gate arrays alongside high-performance microprocessors in clusters. More recently, floating-point libraries, computational kernels, and applications have been used. The kernels and applications, while providing a much higher performance level, must be hand-coded in a hardware description language (HDL). The author contends that using a high level language (HLL) translated fixed and floating point algorithms is a better option. Trident synthesizes circuits from an HLL, using an open framework that allows the programmer to define new floating-point operations easily.