Several industrial applications are becoming highly sophisticated and distributed as they capture and process real-time data from several sources at the same time. Furthermore, availability of acquisition channels such as I/O interfaces per FPGA, also dictates how applications are partitioned over several devices. Thus computationally intensive, resource consuming functions are implemented on multiple hardware accelerators, making low-latency communication to be a crucial factor. In such applications, communication between multiple devices means using high-speed point-to-point protocols with little flexibility in terms of communication scalability. The problem with the current systems is that, they are usually built to meet the needs of a specific application, i.e., lacks flexibility to change the communication topology or upgrade hardware resources. This leads to obsolescence, hardware redesign cost, and also wastes computing power. Taking this into consideration, we propose a scalable, modular and customizable computing platform, with a parallel full-duplex communication network, that redefines the computation and communication paradigm in such applications. We have implemented a scalable distributed secure H.264 encoding application with 3 channels over 3 customizable FPGA modules. In a distributed architecture, the inter-FPGA communication time is almost completely overshadowed by the overall execution time for bigger data-sets, and is comparable to the overall execution time of a non-distributed architecture, for the same implementation scaled down to 1 channel for 1 FPGA. This makes our architecture highly scalable and suitable for high-performance streaming applications. With 3 detachable FPGA modules, each sending and receive data simultaneously at 3 GB/s each, we measured the total net unidirectional traffic at any given time in the system is 9 GB/s, making the total net bidirectional bandwidth for 6 modules to be 36 GB/s.

Embedded reconfigurable computing is becoming a new paradigm for system designers in avionic applications. In fact, FPGAs can be used for more than just computational purpose in order to improve the system performance. The introduction of FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) I/O standard has given a new purpose for FPGAs to be used as a communication platform. Taking into account the features offered by FPGAs and FMCs, such as runtime reconfiguration and modularity, we have redefined the role of these devices to be used as a generic communication and computation-centric platform. A new modular, runtime reconfigurable, Intellectual Property (IP)-based communication-centric platform for avionic applications has been designed. This means that, when the communication requirement of an avionic system changes, the necessary communication protocol is installed and executed on demand, without disturbing the normal operation of a time-critical avionic system. The efficiency and the performances of our platform are illustrated through a real industrial use-case designed using a computationally intensive application and several avionic I/O bus standards. The reconfiguration latency can be hidden totally in many cases. While in certain others, the overhead of reconfiguration can be justified by the reduction in the resource utilization.