What does one even use that much FPGA for? Any organization that could afford that could probably afford making an ASIC of comparable or better performance.
...That said, that's crazy impressive.
...That said, that's crazy impressive.
This stream of maybe a TByte/sec of data will then be filtered and decimated/downconverted in real time by racks full of DSP/FPGA boards. Here's a picture of one board used for an Australian facility:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/news/newsletter/oct06/CABB.htm
5x Virtex II XC2VP50 (23,616 slices, 2 PowerPC CPU blocks, $1700 each)
5x Virtex 4 XC4VSX55 (15,360 slices, $1300 each)
Yes, an ASIC might be more energy efficient and could be made faster, but FPGAs give you the flexibility to adapt your algorithms and filter topologies. And an ASIC run might cost you half a million dollars whereas with FPGAs you only spend ~15'000$/board.