BORPH: Berkeley Operating system for ReProgrammable Hardware
 

http://www.eee.hku.hk/~hso/borph.html

"BORPH is an Operating System designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. It is an extented version of Linux that handles FPGA resources as if they were CPU's. BORPH introduces the concept of hardware process which behaves just like a normal user program except it is a hardware design running on a FPGA. Hardware processes behave like normal software programs. The BORPH kernel provides standard system services, such as file system access, to hardware processes, allowing them to communicate with the rest of the system easily and systematically."

This is apparently for operating telescopes. I bet there are other uses for it if I could afford a system with multiple FPGA's.