Due to their inherent reconfigurable nature and their low power consumption , Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have become so complementary to microprocessors and as a result, their use in all the supercomputing clusters is advised. Today only few computers use the FPGAs for accelerating the application specific performance. The high performance computing area of applicaton of FPGA is discussed in this article. reconfigurable computing concept was attributed to Gerald Estrin in his description of a hybrid computer. Xilinx launched the first commercial SRAM based FPGA. They have evolved a lot and as a result, the present FPGAs have multi-million-gate computing platforms with logic blocks, embedded memory, fast routing matrices, and microprocessors all on one silicon die. Some of the current applications of the FPGAs include:
-speech recognition
-cryptography
-computer hardware emulation
-bioinformatics
-aerospace and defense systems etc.
A supercomputer ahs several microprocessors running in parallel in order to have the highest processing power. But according to the Moore’s law, today’s supercomputer is tommorrow’s ordinary computer. Only a few companies produce FPGAs today among which are Lattice (SRAM,flash), Quicklogic (Antifuse), Xilinx (SRAM), Altera (SRAM, Flash) and Actel (Antifuse). A wide rang e of device families are offered by these manufacturers. Of these Xilinx has a significant market share due to their design innovations and the main technologies. coarse grained reconfigurable computing arrays (CGRA) were examined by the researchers to implement a vast variety of functions and to reduce the significant cost associated with the fine grained reconfigurable logic devices that empower FPGA.

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