Definition
JANUS is a massively parallel application-driven machine, developed in the years 2006–2008 to support Monte Carlo simulations of spin-glass systems, a compute-intensive application in statistical physics. JANUS – fully based on FPGA technology – is a large array of processing elements that work under the supervision of a traditional host-machine; they are firmware-configured on-the-fly to run an application code developed in a hardware description language. Each processing element, when configured for spin-glass simulations, implements a massively-parallel architecture, midway between a graphic processing unit and a many-core CPU, in which several hundreds small processing cores concurrently run a SIMD application. For the specific application for which it was developed, JANUS offered approximately a 1, 000 ×performance gain over systems available at the time it was brought on line.
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Application-driven computing systems have been used in many cases in...
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Tripiccione, R. (2011). JANUS FPGA-Based Machine. In: Padua, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_414
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_414
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