FPGA Workshop held at McGill University

On April 3 and 4th at McGill University, an Intel training workshop on how to accelerate computational science through the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) was held. The event was sponsored by Dell/EMC, Intel, and the Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives Neurohub Project and over the two days experts from Intel gave scientists training on how to use new programming tools to improve the performance of scientific applications, including neuroimaging pipelines, machine learning, and other mathematical algorithms. FPGAs, which are essentially a blank slate to create applications in hardware, have traditionally been difficult to use for general software developers, but with the tools presented, it has now become possible for scientific application developers as accelerators to speed up their time to solution by orders of magnitude.  There were 16 attendees from the McGill Centre for Integrated Neuroscience, the McGill Qualitative Life Science program, Concordia University, the University of Montreal, and the MILA Research Institute.