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12th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM'04)
Reconfigurable Molecular Dynamics Simulator
Napa, California
April 20-April 23
ISBN: 0-7695-2230-0
Navid Azizi, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Ian Kuon, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Aaron Egier, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Ahmad Darabiha, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Paul Chow, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Current high-performance applications are typically implemented on large-scale general-purpose distributed or multi-processing systems often based on commodity microprocessors. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have now reached a level of sophistication that they too could be used for such applications.
In this paper we explore the feasibility of using FPGAs to implement large-scale application-specific computations by way of a case study that implements a novel Molecular Dynamics system. The system has been designed such that it is scalable and parallelizable. On the Transmogrifier 3 (TM3), the system performs calculations on an 8,192 particle system in 37 seconds at 26MHz. This implementation shows that by scaling to more modern parts running at 100MHz, a speedup of over 20x can be achieved compared to a state-of-the-art microprocessor. This can also be achieved at less cost, using less power and taking less space than a standard microprocessor-based system, while maintaining the computational precision required.
Citation:
Navid Azizi, Ian Kuon, Aaron Egier, Ahmad Darabiha, Paul Chow, "Reconfigurable Molecular Dynamics Simulator," fccm, pp.197-206, 12th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM'04), 2004
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