Where is GCC for FPGAs?

A lot of the digital signal processing that gets done in radio astronomy these days is done on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and one of the projects I've been working on from the beginning in my research is developing open-source libraries for programming these chips. My part in this has generally been on the algorithmic/mathematical side: writing FFTs, filters, cross-correlation engines, etc. Another key aspect of this work, though, is a toolflow that allows people to design systems at a high level with parameterized algorithmic cores, and to turn that design into the wiring instructions that tell the FPGA how to implement the system.

We currently use a design entry system based on Simulink running on Matlab, and while it is an extremely powerful environment, we've also found it to be limiting, frustrating, and hard to maintain designs in. In October, I volunteered at an international workshop on astronomy signal processing to explore alternatives to this environment. My current favorite is MyHDL, which uses Python to generate lower-level code in Verilog or VHDL, and I may start looking more deeply into porting a design to use MyHDL.

Something that is bothering me, though, is that however much we work on porting our toolflow open-source equivalents, there is currently no open-source compiler for FPGAs. The state of affairs in FPGA-land is something like PCs in the '70s, when every personal computer had its own specialized compiler. For PCs, the problem was solved by GCC (the Gnu Compiler Collection), which became the default open-source solution for compiling most languages to target the many CPU architectures that exist in the world today.

I'm keeping my eye on gEDA, and notably Icarus, which seems to be a free synthesis tool (synthesis, mapping, and routing are the 3 main stages of compiling for an FPGA). Perhaps mapping and routing can never be open-source, since they tend to be very chip-specific. But here's hoping...

Hands-On Cosmology Education

Yesterday I spent the morning giving a gosh-wow talk about cosmology to a physics class at Athenian High School taught by my housemate Dave Otten. It was a lot of fun, and the students were all very enthusiastic. It was almost entirely driven by their questions, and they loved being pitched curveballs (time is reference-frame dependent, the universe is expanding, spiral arms are standing waves, etc). The hour-and-a-half lecture was over before we knew it.

Afterward, Dave mentioned that it would be really cool if there were a way to talk about galactic-scale astronomy and cosmology that was in keeping with the philosophy of their school, which emphasizes lab-based, hands-on learning. He mentioned that PhET is a free resource he uses for providing interactive simulations that make hands-on labs out of subjects that otherwise would be too slow, small, big, fast, or dangerous to perform live in a classroom. He also lamented that there aren't any galactic- or cosmological-scale simulators there that could help to understand how systems on this scale behave, and that could perhaps illustrate exactly where the problems of dark matter and dark energy are encountered. Has anyone seen something like this?