[amirhirsch]

I wrote an post 5 years ago about how an electronic-design-automation-as-a-service company could sell access to a huge supercomputer for solving these problems faster: http://fpgacomputing.blogspot.com/2008/08/megahard-corp-open...

most researchers make up their own architectures to demonstrate place-and-route algorithms, for example there is this challenge to improve p&r: http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~vaughn/challenge/challenge.html