[benou]

You have to take into account that Titan are super cheap compared to FPGA. Big FPGA boards for HPC can easily cost between 5k$ to 10k$. If you compare to GPU in the same price range, you end-up with K40 or K80, who have a peak at 4.3TFLOPS SP and 5.6TFLOPS SP respectively, much higher than Stratix 10. Moreover, FPGA are not really good at double precision FP, which is important in many HPC area. At the end of the day, the important metric is FLOPS/$, and more importantly what you can achieve for your application and tooling and ecosystem. Many scientists are not computer science experts, and many HPC codes are legacy simulations which can be hard to port and re-validate. In my experience, FPGA are still a nich accelerator vs GPU. And I am not even talking about future Xeon Phi generations. And of course, when talking about HPC you should not forget the elephant in the room: standard Xeon...

[Gladdyu]

My work intends to change the aspect of having to be a computer scientist in order to leverage the power of an FPGA by using Haskell/CLaSH as a HDL which is close to mathematics.

Furthermore, the verification of the designs is simplified a lot by checking directly in Haskell over generating VHDL testbenches and then running an additional simulator tool.

Lastly, I hope that with the recent acquisition of Altera by Intel, some of the other issues you mentioned (mainly floating point performance) additionally with some tooling issues will be addressed as well.

[benou]

I understand that, and having a DSL is definitely a good idea, but you need to create a community, which can be hard (and NVIDIA seems to be good at it). I didn't want to be deceptive, I just wanted to highlight that it was not just a matter of peak FLOPS (in fact it never is - as an engineer working on another niche accelerators I know it too much ;) ).

[rch]

Which other niche accelerators?

[benou]

http://www.kalrayinc.com You can see it as a scaled-out DSP.

[minthd]

I know IBM recently announced about cloud FPGA system called supervessel. Maybe it would be useful for your project.