Feasibility of achieving high calculation speeds on the RASC platform

This paper presents results of the tests performed to determine high speed calculations capabilities of the SGI RASC platform. Different data transfer modes and memory management approaches were examined to choose the most effective combination of the Host and RASC memory adjustments. Obtained results of measurements revealed that Direct I/O mode together with DMA transfer provides the highest data throughput between Host and RASC slice. Nevertheless, for some applications multi-buffering may be more suitable in terms of concurrent data transfer and FPGA algorithm execution capability.