FPGAs for HPC: Open Challenges for Infrastructure and System Operation

As the semiconductor technology advancement driven by Moore's law is slowing down, the importance of reconfigurable computing with FPGAs is getting more important with significant existence in the HPC community as well as data center industries. Although FPGA devices and their design tools have advanced much in the last decade, we do not have sufficient knowledge and experience about the infrastructure and operation of FPGA-based or FPGA-involved HPC systems while we have several academic efforts to prototype FPGA-based HPC systems such as Cygnus at University of Tsukuba, Noctua at Paderborn University, ESSPER at RIKEN R-CCS, and so on. In this special session, we have a panel discussion regarding open challenges for Infrastructure and operation of FPGA-based HPC systems followed by Keynote speech and lightning talks on experiences of HPC using FPGAs.