Inter-FPGA communication with Compaan

© ASTRON

For the last few months, Bas Priest from Stenden University in Emmen has been working on expanding the board support package of UniBoard for Compaan. Compaan software can be used to port "normal" software algorithms onto FPGAs. Furthermore, Compaan can be used to find parallelism in the code, and map this onto multiple FPGAs. Compaan and Astron have been cooperating for over a year now.

The main goal of Bas was to enable the use of the communication links between multiple FPGAs on the UniBoard for the Compaan tooling. Adding this functionality to the board support package allows Compaan to utilize the full capacity of a Uniboard. The picture shows Bas, together with his mentor Hajee Pepping (right), giving a demonstration of a design generated by Compaan and using the communication between two nodes (FPGAs) of the UniBoard. A test--script has been made in which data is constantly written and checked. Over a million datasets are written without any failure.

In the last weeks of Bas's graduation work at ASTRON he will expand the demo, so that all nodes on a UniBoard are used. This will result in a proof-of-concept showing that the Compaan software can use the communication links in between the nodes successfully.

This activity is conducted in the context of the Dome project, a collaboration between ASTRON and IBM.