The addition of reconfigurable hardware (FPGAs) to the nodes of
Beowulf-style clusters has the potential to accelerate a variety of
parallel applications through a combination of parallel programming and
reconfigurable computing techniques. However, making efficient use of
the computational resources available places a significant burden on the
application developer due to the lack of support for reconfigurable
computing and task heterogeneity in standard message-passing libraries.
This paper describes Accessible Reconfigurable Computing (ARC), a
metacomputing environment designed to address these issues. The
architecture, implementation, and operation of the system are described
in detail.