Hi Matus, I sadly did not bring it with me (a bit of self-protection, those devices are addictive) so I cannot demonstrate it live when we now meet. Just to say something funny: In Germany they have just started selling chocolate Santa Clauses, so why not getting one for Xmas similarly prematurely? The small (sufficient for the principles) one costs about as little as a two pints of beer in Norway.
Best, Steffen On 02/09/16 22:33, Matus Kalas wrote: > Sounds really epic! I'm looking forward to check it out properly. > > Long live FPGAs! (Btw, aren't there any interesting news also about > NoCs?) > Matus > > > On 2016-09-02 10:18, Steffen Möller wrote: >> Hi all, >> >> Those who participated in our past Sprint in Lyngby have met Ruben. He >> is the one who kindly packaged all that needed to be packaged for the >> first and yet only completely Open Source toolchain for FPGA computing. >> Details are on http://wiki.debian.org/FPGA/Lattice . >> >> Ruben started that page which takes you by the hand to get some LEDs >> blinking on a 20something $/€ device that attaches to your USB port. It >> features a series of I/O ports to do just about anything or just compute >> (i.e. accelerate) on the device itself. I got a "thank you for that >> page"-email yesterday (Ruben started it, I just added some references). >> It is about the first time this ever happened to me :o) Anyway, so it >> seems like there is some accumulating momentum and people are kind of >> uncertain about what to do. I tell you: There is no risk in spending >> those 25 $/€, which actually should be some 80 $/€ for a better >> performing 8K device. While I have little doubt that both for Xilinx and >> Altera we will also see something evolving in the near future (anybody >> tried to get a free webpack license for the only Spartan-6 compatible >> older ISE tools? something needs to happen on that front). The >> yosys/arachne-pnr/icetools packages of the free pipeline instantaneously >> sky rocketed to almost 140 users. >> >> Anyway - I think we are on the forefront of a significant movement here. >> This combination of free programming tools and cheap devices for >> programmable hardware is completely new. Please keep your eyes and ears >> open. There are closed-source implementations of Smith-Waterman on FPGA >> out there, not so much on BLAST. Those first devices do not have the >> memory to help much with accelerating sequence comparison - the usb port >> is too lame and there is not enough memory on the device to keep the >> data. But this is all just a matter of time. Hack along! And maybe make >> some noise with your engineers on site for whom a PCI/USB3 card with >> such an FPGA and a couple of gigs of memory on board is likely little >> more than a master thesis away. >> >> Cheers, >> >> Steffen
