I forgot to answer the other part of your question because I was skimming. The FPGA's didn't help SGI I don't think. They were just too hard to use and the nodes were expensive. However, SGI did the right thing at the wrong time period: connecting FPGA's to memory shared with CPU's over an ultra-high-speed, low-latency, cache-coherent interconnect. This allowed FPGA co-processing to do far more than it ever could on PCI cards where the PCI overhead was significant for many applications. Just like how NUMA performance trumped clusters over Ethernet or even Infiniband in many cases.
So, I was citing them as the opening chapter to the book Intel's about to be writing on how to do FPGA coprocessors. Hopefully. Meanwhile, FPGA's plugging into HyperTransport or an inexpensive NUMA would still be A Good Thing to have. :)
So, I was citing them as the opening chapter to the book Intel's about to be writing on how to do FPGA coprocessors. Hopefully. Meanwhile, FPGA's plugging into HyperTransport or an inexpensive NUMA would still be A Good Thing to have. :)