Teramac-configurable custom computing

The Teramac configurable hardware system can execute synchronous logic designs of up to one million gates at rates up to l megahertz. A fully configured Teramac includes half a gigabyte of RAM and hardware support for large multiported register files. The system has been built from custom FPGA's packaged in large multichip modules (MCMs). A large custom circuit (-1,000,000 gates) may be compiled onto the hardware in approximately 2 hours, without user intervention. The system is being used to explore the potential of custom computing machinery (CCM). 1 Teramac System Overview Research on special purpose parallel architectures and custom computing is very much an experimental science dependent on the existence of prototypes. We have built an FPGA-based configurable custom computing engine to enable experiments on an interesting scale. Teramac is a configurable hardware system comprising 1728 custom FPGAs and .5 gigabytes of RAM. It features: We are currently conducting experiments with an 8 board Teramac system.