How to connect more than one FPGA-board

You can use Samtec cables for connecting boards via the HSMC connectors, however, I would not recommend it. I have the cables, and there is no mechanical retention mechanism on the cable, so in my opinion it would not be very reliable in a system.

You could connect multiple boards via their PCIe interfaces. I have a board from OneStopSystems;

http://www.onestopsystems.com/pcie_atx_bp.php

that I plan on using for testing a couple of Stratix IV GX development kits. The board connects to the PCI-Express card on my laptop. A nice convenient setup.

What are your data flow requirements? Where is the data coming from? Are you talking MB/s, GB/s, TB/s? Or is the task 'processing' dominated?

Do your FPGAs need to be reconfigured dynamically, or can they be configured once at power-on? This is a critical question, as reconfiguring a device on the PCIe bus would likely require re-enumeration of the PCIe buses, and hence, you'd want to make sure all the software was in place on the host to support that.

There is no support for connecting Quartus to multiple boards, other than to use multiple byte-blasters. In my systems, a control processor (PowerPC) and system controller (FPGA) are always powered, and the data processing FPGAs are powered on/off and reconfigured dynamically under software control, eg.,

http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/~dwh/carma_board/ (http://www.ovro.caltech.edu/%7edwh/carma_board/)

Cheers,

Dave