Parallella Community

After review logicbricks for the Zync ...

I hope the parallella community is able do present it's own set-of 'bricks' for the Zync CPU + FPGA ( + Epiphany ) In the idea that these bricks will effectively use the Epiphany CPU in a way transparent to the operating system. I'd think right away of a brick to accelerate packet processing, an encryption engine, or maybe even a 2D or 3D GPU, opencl processing etc.

It seems also desirable for parallella or it's community to present a board or design which would let one plug in the more powerfull Xylinx Zync FPGA+ARM chips. AFAIK the Xylinx Zync has two 'families', low-end = Artix Fabrid, High-End = Kintex Fabric but run on the same socket. Allow for plugging the whole range into a parallella board would be very very nice. Then again, i'm not sure on specifics.

Come to think of it, would an FPGA permit to have it act as a many-cpu next to the many-core Epiphany ?

IMHO this would bring a whole new range of computers into the world which could adapt to the needs of the user or it's functionality.

My shortlist for such bricks are * Encryption Acceleration Engine ( ssl, ipsec ) * Compression Engine * GPU 2D/3D * GCC compile acceleration for cross-platform etc * Packet Processing Acceleration ( openvswitch ) Though the last one would require for the ability to connect a Ethernet backplane with anyting from 4 - 16 Ethernet ports ( gigabit )

Would it be possible to load multiple bricks in parallell onto a sufficiëntly large FPGA ?

For example, switch a parallella from a modest desktop to a dedicated blender-rendering node by loading/unloading FPGA bricks does not seem unlikely. Or switch it from a dedicated ssl-offloading accelerator to an IDS/IPS accelerator ( as demonstrated by altera on stratix fpga )