FCCM 2017 Media Center
Press Release: A Milestone Year for FCCM
The 25th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM 2017) will take place Sunday April 30th through Tuesday May 2nd, returning to its roots in Napa Valley, California.
This year marks the 25-year milestone for FCCM and comes at the height of industrial investment in FPGAs and reconfigurable computing, such as Intel's recent acquisition of Altera and Microsoft's and Amazon's development of reconfigurable technology in their cloud infrastructure.
Two Day Technical Program
The three-day symposium will feature nine technical sessions with 30 papers, including topics on overlays, high-level synthesis, test and debug, computer aided design, and applications in big data analytics, physics, biology, and machine learning.
Post Conference Training: Xilinx and Intel
On May 3 and 4, Parimal Patel from Xilinx will host a post-conference hands on tutorial for the PYNQ platform, an open-source framework that enables programmers who want to use embedded systems to exploit the capabilities of Xilinx Zynq All Programmable SoCs (APSoC). This tutorial will feature the latest version of PYNQ with Python 3.6 and Asyncio support for processor and fabric interrupts. Several new overlays will be introduced along with examples of overlay creation and binding into the PYNQ framework.
On May 3, Blair Fort from Intel will host a post-conference training session on Embedded Linux and OpenCL SDK for Intel SoC FPGA Devices using the Cyclone V SoC device. The training will cover how to run Linux on the device and use its development environment to create software programs that communicate with the FPGA.
FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall-of-Fame Induction
We will recognize the induction of two seminal papers from this community into the 2017 Class of the ACM/TCFPGA FPGA and Reconfigurable Computing Hall of Fame (http://hof.tcfpga.org):
- Programmable Active Memories: Reconfigurable Systems Come of Age. Jean E. Vuillemin, Patrice Bertin, Didier Roncin, Mark Shand, Herve Touati, and Philippe Boucard. IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 56-69, 1996
- A Defect-Tolerant Computer Architecture: Opportunities for Nanotechnology. James R. Heath, Philip J. Kuekes, Gregory S. Snider, and R. Stanley Williams. Science, vol. 280, no. 5370, pp. 1716-1721, 1998.
FPGAs in the Cloud: Using Amazon's F1 Instances
This year's conference will include a Sunday afternoon workshop hosted by
David Pellerin of Amazon Web Services, describing the architecture, programming environment, and applications created using the Amazon F1 FPGA cloud instance. The workshop will include an update on the AWS Marketplace, which allows application developers and IP providers to distribute their proprietary designs in a secure manner to other cloud customers. The workshop will cover the use of FPGA design tools on the cloud, simulation and debugging methods, and the use of partial reconfiguration during creation of an Amazon FPGA Images (AFI). The workshop also covers deployment methods available to FPGA developers and their customers for interactive or batch workloads including video and image processing, genomics, financial computing, and accelerated analytics.
Reflecting on 25 Years of FCCM
On Sunday evening FCCM will host a retrospective panel commemorating FCCM's 25th year that will reflect on the impact and lessons learned from some of the original custom computing machines and high-level synthesis languages. The panel includes an opportunity to hear from authors of both of the hall-of-fame papers as well as other reconfigurable computing pioneers:
- Mark Shand, Waymo LLC: "A 50K gate silicon foundry, with 50 ms turn-around time: A PAM retrospective."
- Maya Gokhale, Lawrence Livermore National Lab: "Parallel Programming Models for Custom Computing Arrays: Lessons from FCCM Roots"
- Stan Williams, HP Enterprise: "The lessons of Teramac revisited"
- John Wawrzynek, UC Berkeley: "Garp: A Reconfigurable Coprocessor---Still a good idea 20 years later?"
Demo Night
On Monday night, FCCM will host its annual informal show-and-tell called Demo Night. Paper and poster authors and commercial vendors bring their FCCMs, hardware, gateware, slideware, software, tools, chips, and set up demos. Attendees circulate, enjoy the demos, and engage with the presenters while enjoying the food and drink at this stand-up and learn event.
Design Competition
This year's FCCM will also feature a design competition sponsored by Maxeler's University Program, with a prize of $1000 and a Maxeler Galava card.
About IEEE FCCM
The IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines is the pre-eminent North American technical conference in reconfigurable computing, http://www.fccm.org/.
Contact: Jason D. Bakos, General Chair, IEEE FCCM 2017.