An accelerator for double precision floating point operations

We describe DPFPA (Double Precision Floating Point Accelerator) an FPGA based coprocessor interfaced to the CPU through the PCI bus; it is conceived to accelerate the evaluation of double precision floating point operations. This coprocessor is based on two double precision floating point units: a pipelined adder and a pipelined multiplier. The work is part of a global project aimed to design and build a parallel system made up by a cluster of accelerated workstations. First estimations of performance have been obtained, using a similar board developed at Fermilab (Batavia, IL) with less recent components and working at half the frequency with respect to DPFPA. Even in this case, a substantial acceleration with respect to the execution on Intel's CPU based mother-board was observed.