Mandelbrot Explorer
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A fun little demo of some game-changing technologies
37 | 38 |What is it?
41 |42 | This Mandelbrot fractal explorer is a demonstration and development vehicle for emerging technologies, including: 43 |
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- Cloud FPGAs 45 |
- Hardware-accelerated web applications 46 |
- Advanced hardware modeling in Transaction-Level Verilog 47 |
Enable Hardware Acceleration
52 |53 | The true showcase is enabled by special hardware 54 | acceleration technology, called cloud FPGAs. We use these to accelerate the Mandelbrot calculations 55 | by ~20x! This specialized hardware isn’t cheap, though, so we do not provide it here, but we enable you to provide 56 | your own. It is not for the faint of heart, but we’re doing our best to make it easier. You can find 57 | more information from the open-source repository. 58 |
59 |Cool Technologies
62 |Cloud FPGAs:
63 |64 | Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are chips containing millions or billions of logic gates that 65 | can be configured to perform any logic function. In contrast, Application-Specific Integrated 66 | Circuilts (ASICs) are designed and manufactured for a specific purpose. ASICs are optimized; FPGAs 67 | are flexible. And FPGAs are now available in the cloud, which is a huge enabler for open-source 68 | hardware! 69 |
70 |Hardware Accelerated Web Applications:
71 |72 | Could FPGAs have great potential to accelerate compute infrastructure. But they are in their infancy. 73 | The barriers to entry are significant. This project is the development vehicle for an open-source 74 | framework for accelerating web applications (or services) using cloud FPGAs. The aim is to provide the 75 | communication layer by which a web application can communicate through standard web protocols, 76 | directly with hardware kernels running on cloud FPGAs. You are witnessing the first implementation 77 | of this infrastructure, or at least you would be if a cloud FPGA was attached. 78 |
79 |Transaction-Level Verilog:
80 |81 | One of the biggest hurdles to ubiquitous hardware acceleration is the mere fact that hardware is not 82 | as easy to program as software. But new technologies are making it easier. This project utilizes 83 | advanced modern modeling techniques available in Transaction-Level Verilog (TL-Verilog). You can 84 | learn about these techniques and try them for yourself at 85 | makerchip.com. 86 |
87 |Contribute!
90 |91 | This is a group effort. It’s tons of fun, it’s charting new territory, and it’s got something to 92 | offer everyone. You could: 93 |
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- Improve the website. 95 |
- Enhance the algorithms. 96 |
- Optimize the hardware kernel. 97 |
100 | If you are a student, Google 101 | Summer of Code might be a great opportunity to get involved. 102 |
103 |104 | Feel free to contact the authors, or browse the 105 | project on github. 106 |
107 |Donate
110 |111 | Sorry, we do not have a donation system in place, yet. But, 112 | let us know you care. If there is enough 113 | interest we will make it possible to sponsor cloud FPGA time in your name. 114 |
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