ORNL informal meeting notes

Met with Olaf Storaasli, former NASA guy:

• got into FPGAs
• NASA likes 'em because they're more energy efficient
• if you do it right, you can get the whole chip active rather than just one part at a time as in microprocessors
• used on actual spacecraft
• btw, the way you deal with radiation is you reload the program twice a day...go figure.
  
• not clear how to program the buggers
• most work still done in VHDL
• some C-to-FPGA work done (I am skeptical of this approach)
• one guy did Matlab to FPGA (this seems a little cooler to me)
• new Crays ship with 2 FPGAs per processor