The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is leading an international effort to promote the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in high-level and enterprise applications. The OpenFPGA consortium will develop and share critical information, technologies and best practices for using its applications.
OSC announced this project at the Manchester Reconfigurable Computing Conference earlier this year. The conference united developers and hardware manufacturers with academic, government and commercial organizations to advance the use of FPGA technology in high-level applications.
Research on executable software protection using attached FPGAs is being consulted to solve executable software protection problems. This project aims to defeat any effort to reverse engineer the protected software. When FPGA design tools are available, the instruction set can be modified and a new one incorporated into the reconfigurable processor.
In October, OSC began to determine diverse communities' interest in collaborating to solve common problems of portability, interoperability and intra-application communication.
With international interest confirmed, creating the OpenFPGA Consortium commenced in February 2005 when an ad hoc steering group was formed with representatives from multiple application areas spanning multiple countries.
The consortium's objectives are to characterize best practices, explore standardization, improve education and promote reconfigurable computing solutions, and encourage broad participation and collaboration.
OpenFPGA consortium steering group members include: Cray, Inc., General Electric Global Research, Koan Corporation, Mitrion, Nallatech, National Aeronautics and Space Administration , NCI-Advanced Biomedical Computing Center, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, National Institute of Standards and Technology , Sandia National Laboratory, Silicon Graphics, Inc., Starbridge Systems, Inc., OSC, University of Cincinnati, University of Manchester, University of South Carolina, University of Toledo, and Zuse Institute Berlin.
For more information or to register, please visit the consortium's new website at http:// www.openfpga.org.
