About OpenFPGA
OpenFPGA Inc. is a non-profit corporation working to foster continued progress in systems employing reconfigurable computing technology. Through the development of open industry standards, promotion of best practices, and support of cross-organizational collaboration, OpenFPGA enables the rapid adoption of advances in reconfigurable computing industrywide.
OpenFPGA is supported through individual memberships and organizational sponsorships.
Contact Us:
OpenFPGA Inc.
300 College Park Avenue
Dayton, OH 45469-0187
Phone: 937/229-5506
Fax: 937/229-1555
OpenFPGA greatly appreciates the operational and host support provided by the University of Dayton.
OpenFPGA name and logo are registered trademarks of OpenFPGA Inc. 2007-2008.
OpenFPGA Mission and Goals
The mission of OpenFPGA.org is to promote the use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays in high level and enterprise applications by collaboratively defining, developing and sharing critical information, technologies and best practices.
This mission is realized through the pursuit of the following objectives:
INNOVATION AND EVALUATION
- To share tools and best practices for developing, integrating and evaluating correctness and performance of FPGA-based programs.
STANDARDIZATION
- To define develop, and promote the use of open standards for communication between application programs and FPGA technologies.
EDUCATION
- To gather and prepare materials required to help educate future adopters of FPGA technology, ranging from students to industry professionals.
PROMOTION
- To promote the adoption of FPGA technologies in high-performance and enterprise computing by gathering, documenting and sharing cases where FPGA technologies have been successfully deployed.
COMMUNICATION AND COLLABORATION
- To provide a communication venue for FPGA technologists to share insight and locate collaborators for future projects.
PARTICIPATION
- To maintain broad participation with involvement of international commercial, government and academic organizations developing FPGA hardware, systems, tools and applications.
Current Board of Directors
Eric Stahlberg - President
Eric Stahlberg is one of the organizing founders of the OpenFPGA organization, an
international effort to advance the use of reconfigurable computing in high-performance computing applications.
Throughout his career, he has worked in several leading-edge efforts to broaden the use of new parallel
technologies including efforts with pre-standard message passing on massively parallel computers,
contributing to efforts developing the OpenMP standard, and now working to expand the use of FPGA technology.
Eric graduated with his doctorate in computational chemistry from the Ohio State University and has grown
his experience in exploiting leading-edge computing technologies working for organizations including
Argonne National Laboratory, Cray Research Inc., Oxford Molecular Group, Vital Images, Inc.,
Chemical Abstracts Service and with the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
Dr. Stahlberg is presently Director of Computational Science at Wittenberg University, Springfield, Ohio
Alan Coppola - Vice-President
Alan is President of OptNgn Software LLC, a Portland, Oregon based company focusing on FPGA acceleration libraries.
Alan has been a visiting faculty at Evergreen State College, Principal Software Engineer at Cypress and a software engineer at Mentor Graphics.
Alan's specialities include software tools for HDL design, optimization, verification, and applications.
Olaf Storaasli - Recording Secretary
Olaf is a Distinguished Research Scientist in the Future Technologies Group of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Lab.
A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Olaf received his BA in physics, mathematics and French form Concordia College (Moorhead, MN), his MA
from the University of South Dakota, and his PhD from North Carolina State University. Olaf is an internationally-known expert
in parallel methods for structural mechanics on high-performance computers. He has received the prestigious Floyd L. Thompson
Fellowship of NASA Langley Research Center for post-doctoral research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
He conceived and led a NASA Creativity and Innovation program in 2000 to explore FPGAs as an alternative to CPUs.
Click here for more information
Kevin Wohlever - Treasurer
Kevin has been involved in High Performance Computing or Supercomputing for over 20 years. He was around at founding of the Ohio Supercomputer Center in 1987 and except for a few years when he left to help establish supercomputer centers for the EPA and Dow chemical as the technical lead, has been involved in OSC ever since.
Kevins career has overlapped a large part of the supercomputing move from expensive, proprietary systems only available to government agencies, to relatively inexpensive, with open operating system environments that are available to a wide range of users. Along the way, Kevin has worked for: The National Security Agency, NASA, the US EPA, Dow Chemical, Nationwide Insurance, Cray Research, and of course, OSC. During that time he has moved from a system administrator up through the ranks as a project leader to his current position as the director of the OSC operations in Springfield.
In his spare time, Kevin has run a soccer league in the Columbus area, is an Assistant Scout Master for the Boy Scouts, is a FIFA certified soccer referee and is active in youth sports in Worthington, Ohio, his current home. Kevin is married to Barbara, and they have two children, the oldest is at The Ohio State University and the youngest is a junior at Worthington Kilbourne High School.
A native of Lorain, Ohio, Kevin is a graduate of Bowling Green State University.
Malachy Devlin - Commercial at-large
Dr. Devlin joined Nallatech in 1996, as CTO. He is recognised worldwide, as an industry expert on FPGA computing technologies. Dr Devlin obtained his PhD in Signal Processing from Strathclyde University and joined Nallatech in 1996. He is a software specialist with several years experience in various companies including the National Engineering Laboratory, Telia
in Sweden and Hughes Microelectronics (now part of Raytheon).
He was part of the team who developed Nallatech's award- winning DIME modular technology based on FPGAs.
Dr Devlin has worked closely with key blue-chip companies and strategic partners in the development of
Nallatechs technology and product roadmaps.
His specializations include FPGAs, DSP Algorithms, High Performance Computing,
High Performance Embedded Computing, Embedded Software, Embedded Software Development and
Distributed Computing Systems.
Malachy works as an independent industry consultant with a specialization for cross-industry standards.
Jon Huppenthal - Commercial at-large
Jon Huppenthal joined Seymour Cray as a co-founder of SRC Computers in 1996.
Later that year, Mr. Huppenthal became the chief hardware technologist and vice president of hardware
development for the organization, setting the strategic direction and leading the hardware design and
integration efforts for the company. In 2004 Mr. Huppenthal was appointed president and CEO of SRC.
Prior to joining SRC, Mr. Huppenthal spent seven years with Cray Computer Corporation as chief
engineer and manager of electrical design. In addition, he has held similar positions with Apple
Computer Corporation, TRW and Northrop Defense Systems. Mr. Huppenthal's patent portfolio
includes 16 patents ranging from high-speed wafer testing to optical and electrical interconnects
and also includes the invention of SRC's MAP reconfigurable processor. Mr. Huppenthal has a
B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University.
Volodymyr Kindratenko - Academic at-large
Volodymyr (Vlad) is a senior research scientist at the Innovative Systems Lab (ISL) at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA.
He received his D. Sc. degree at the University of Antwerp Belgium in 1997 and the
MS degree from Vynnychenko State Pedagogical University, Kirovograd, Ukraine in 1993.
His research interests include high-performance computing and special purpose
computing architectures, next-generation computational accelerators such as FPGAs, Cell and GPUs.
Click here for more information
Thomas Steinke - Academic at-large
Dr. Thomas Steinke is leader of the Alignment and threading on massively parallel computers group
at the Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum fr Informationstechnik Berlin (ZIB) since August 2001, working on in-silico
methods for protein structure prediction. From 1992 until 2001, he was consultant for supercomputer applications
in the field of computational chemistry at ZIB. In that time he served as member of the UniChem Advisory Board
with Cray Research from 1993 until 1995, and later of the Quantum Chemistry Steering Group with Oxford
Molecular Group until September 2000. He received his Diploma in Chemistry in 1985 from the University of
Leipzig and his Dr. rer. nat. in 1990 from Humboldt-Universitt zu Berlin.
Aussie Schnore - Past-president Disignate
Aussie Schnores 18 year career in semiconductors, power electronics, embedded
systems and advanced computing includes technology strategy development, project management,
technical leadership, architecting designs and solutions impacting most of the GE businesses
and Lockheed Martin.
Currently a project leader for Reconfigurable and Non-conventional
Computing within GE Global Researchs Advanced Computing Laboratory Aussie is responsible for development,
planning and execution of technology development programs with several GE businesses. In this position he has lead/managed efforts for GE Healthcare, GE Aviation and others. Results of this work have been used to guide decisions for GE Commercial Finance, GE Security and as Congressional Testimony in front the House Committee on Science presented by Ray Orbach, Director of the DOE Office of Science. Aussie is also a principle GE investigator on several efforts within Lockheed Martin and is one of the founders of the Lockheed Martin Non-Conventional Computing Technology Focus Group.
A 1996 Graduate of Union College, he holds a Bachelors of Science degree in
Electrical Engineering. Aussie is winner of the 1995 GE Global Research, Whitney Technical Achievers Award, the 2003 ACT Cardboard Car Race Long Distance Award and numerous other GE Corporate Awards. He holds 9 patents in a variety of areas and is a member of the ACM.
OpenFPGA Founding Steering Group Members