A distributed memory MIMD multi-computer with reconfigurable custom computing capabilities

Armstrong III is a multi node multi-computer designed and built at the Laboratory for Engineering Man/Machine System (LEMS) of Brown University. Each node contains a RISC processor and reconfigurable resources implemented with FPGAs. The primary benefit in using FPGAs is that the resulting hardware is neither rigid nor permanent but is in-circuit reprogrammable. This allows each node to be tailored to the computational requirements of an application. This paper describes the Armstrong III architecture and concludes with a substantive example application that performs HMM Training for speech recognition with the reconfigurable platform.