I definitely agree about GE being a bad choice, I suspect that something like HT would work better for this application. I wouldn't be concerned about Virtex-4

I definitely agree about GE being a bad choice, I suspect that something like HT would work better for this application. I wouldn't be concerned about Virtex-4 being old, being used as a proof of concept for this should at least give some indication of how the design of the whole thing scales and give some idea of the problems that will come about, latency being one of them.