Four application briefs from the military realm

A recent spinoff from NASA Tech Briefs, called Defense Tech Briefs, usually focuses on field applications of whole computing systems or specialized subsystems for avionics or advanced materials. But the April 2009 issue offers a Technology Focus on FPGAs with four interesting papers on compute applications and FPGA device testing. The printed overviews are little more than abstracts, and the promised white papers were not online as of April 10, but the teasers leave the reader wanting more.

A team at George Washington University describes using an SRC-6E reconfigurable computer from SRC Computing, based on multiple Virtex-II FPGAs, for onboard cloud detection using algorithms from the Landsat 7 satellite software. Nael Abu-Gazaleh of SUNY-Binghamton describes an Air Force Research Labs project to apply high-performance computing clusters to fine-grained parallel processing used in war-game simulations. The Heterogeneous High Performance Clusters developed at AFRL combine dual Intel Xeon processors with an AMD Wildstar II board based on Virtex II FPGAs.

Alain J. Martin of Situs Logic, along with a team from AFRL at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, describes the role of asynchronous FPGAs, used with Large-Integer Processors, in cryptographic computing systems. Finally, Jason Ives of the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base compare different methods of reconfiguring FPGAs based on Configurable Logic Blocks, looking for differences in row and column replacement methods.

It’s refreshing, particularly at a time of shrinking magazine and journal sizes and titles, to see a vertical-market publication devote space to FPGA applications. I’ll be looking forward to the full white papers on the DTB web site.