Selected Publications
Stephen Craven, Cameron Patterson, and Peter Athanas, "Super-sized Multiplies: How Do FPGAs Fare in Extended Digit Multipliers?", Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference on Military and Aerospace Programmable Logic Devices, MAPLD 2004, Washington, DC, Sep 2004.
Abstract:
Extended digit multiplication can be an effective benchmark for comparing contemporary CPUs to other architectures and devices. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a distributed computing effort to find large prime numbers, has produced highly optimized code for multiplying large, multimillion digit numbers on Pentium processors. This paper presents a hardware large integer multiplier implemented in a Xilinx FPGA. The design, which utilizes an all-integer Fast Fourier Transform, is compared to a Pentium processor running the optimized GIMPS code. The results show that while a speed-up is achieved by the FPGA, the cost of the hardware likely outweighs any performance benefit.
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