[K42-discussion] [Fastos] The Holy Grail in High Perf Computing ?

[Jimi Xenidis]

On Oct 19, 2006, at 6:56 PM, William DUCK wrote:

> Hello,
>
> The holy grail ? :
>
> http://www.easic.com/index.php?p=faq1
>
> http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/ 
> prose.index.html
>
> A libOS on top of a Programmable ASIC ...

Not sure about "holly grail", in my experience ASICs are used as  
accelerator and are/should not have general purpose processing  
capabilities that libOS might need.  However, it can sure be easier/ 
faster and performant to write a libOS for the host processor to  
support an ASIC rather than to modify an existing large operating  
system to do so.

We demonstrated this on the Cell processor with positive results.
-JX