FPGA/CPU acceleration: Are companies using it?

[Altera_Forum]

Hi all, 

 There has been a lot of buzz about FPGAs to be used as accelerators for data centers (among others on Intel's acquisition of Altera). Which made me wonder: Are there any companies out there that have seriously adopted that methodology, except Microsoft's Catapult project? I'm not talking about companies offering solutions, and not academic research projects.  Really for the sake of curiosity, can anyone point at a big company that has FPGAs crunching data for them in a room full with hybrid processor/FPGA computers? Or even a not-so-big?  Thanks,  Andrew.

[Altera_Forum]

There are a lot of choices available. FPGA is only one of them. It totally depends on what calculations are being done. Some are fastest with FPGAs, others with GPUs and some with DSP, or large numbers of traditional processors connected together.

[Altera_Forum]

I find this interesting, because as an FPGA programmer, I really wanted this to work. However, coding is painful and long, even with MATLAB's HDL coder. The development time is not worth the payoff, and we end up just using FPGA's for interfacing.

[Altera_Forum]

OpeCL should improve development speed, but itis still slower than development for GPU.