More and more High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) leverages technology from commercial high performance computing systems. To date, HPEC has only tapped the lower end of commercial high performance computing technology. As more of the advanced commercial technology moves into the embedded space, this presents a unique opportunity to change the fundamentals of how HPEC solutions are addressed. Within HPEC, two types of application specific processing elements -- reconfigurable and custom -- are being used. Reconfigurable elements are comprised of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology and custom elements are comprised of such various devices as Digital Signal Processors (DSP), DARPA Polymorphic Computing Architectures (PCA) and others. The integration of these devices presents significant challenges both to the system architecture and to the programming models. This presentation will describe a set of system requirements and methods to not only include these application specific processing devices but to allow effective scaling of application specific processing devices.
