[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.