Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Altera Europe | Subject: Stratix II
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 08 June 2006
FPGA coprocessor accelerates x86
applications
XtremeData is using a Stratix II FPGA for its XD1000 FPGA coprocessing solution.
XtremeData chose Altera's largest Stratix II FPGA device for its XD1000 FPGA coprocessing solution The XD100 FPGA module is pin compatible with the AMD Opteron processor, offering developers the ability to accelerate algorithms by up to 100 times and applications by up to 10 times, while minimising power consumption
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 May 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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Software upgrade provides speed boost
Customers using the 8.0 release to design Altera's 65nm Stratix III FPGAs on Windows platforms will see compile times reduced by up to 50%.
Shrink to 40nm increases FPGA capabilities
The Stratix IV family has up to 680K logic elements, 2x bigger than Altera's Stratix III family, which currently comprise currently the largest FPGAs on the market.
XtremeData's XD1000 FPGA coprocessor module includes the Altera Stratix II EP2S180 FPGA and a HyperTransport bus.
Developers across a wide range of applications - such as medical imaging, data analytics, text searches, network security and scientific computing - now have a "plug and play" solution for adding processing performance to their systems without having to modify their infrastructure.
"The XD1000 FPGA module integrated with a robust development environment represents a significant breakthrough in application acceleration".
Further reading
FPGAs support serial gigabit interface
Stratix III FPGAs are the industry's first programmable logic devices able to support Gigabit Ethernet SGMII on LVDS pins.
FPGAs support SFI-5 optical comms standard
The SFI-5 specification is a chip-to-chip standard that ensures interoperability between forward-error correction and the framer, as well as from industry-leading optical transponder devices.
FPGAs race to DDR3 interface speeds
Higher memory bandwidth enables new communications, computing and video processing applications that were either previously impossible or required doubling the number of memory banks.
"The coprocessing environment will enable the acceleration of many applications", said Randy Allen, Corporate Vice President, Server/Workstation Business, AMD.
"This is an elegant solution that allows the users of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platforms to benefit from continuous performance improvements in both the AMD Opteron processor and the Stratix II family of devices".
XtremeData has packaged the Stratix II EP2S180 device, the industry's highest-density, highest-performance FPGA in production, onto a credit card-sised board that fits into the secondary CPU sockets of any 2P or 4P AMD Opteron processor-based motherboard.
The XD1000 supports tight board-height form factors, including 1U servers, server blades and Advanced Telecom Computing Architecture (ATCA) platforms.
The XD1000 includes multiple HyperTransport interfaces that are 16bit wide running at 3.2Gbit/s.
It also features a 128bit-wide DDR333 memory interface, up to 8Mbyte of high-speed SRAM and 32Mbyte of Flash memory.
Additionally, XtremeData has several next-generation variants of XD1000 planned for future release.
XtremeData used Altera's SOPC Builder system integration tool and the Nios II soft-core CPU to develop the XD1000.
The XD1000 uses a HyperTransport bus to achieve low-latency communication with the host AMD Opteron processor.
This means that the traditional latency chain of CPU-to-north-bridge-to-south-bridge (via PCI interface)-to-FPGA has been reduced to a point-to-point CPU-to-FPGA link.
compared with competing I/O board systems, the XD1000 offers a more scalable solution.
It gives access to more memory (via DIMM modules) and provides higher bandwidth and lower latency interconnects than north bridge solutions, at a much lower total cost of ownership.
"We chose the Stratix II family not only because of its performance and density advantages over other FPGAs, but because Altera's system-level design software is best in class, enabling us to work faster and more efficiently", said Ravi Chandran, CEO of XtremeData.
Chandran continued: "FPGAs are well understood in many industries as an accelerator".
"The key to acceleration is parallelism, where an FPGA operating in the subgigahertz range can outperform a multigigahertz CPU via parallelism".
"It's similar to how the human brain can outperform CPUs in many tasks by operating in a massively parallel manner".
For example, FPGA-based hardware acceleration used in medical CT imaging runs the overall application 10 times faster when each 3GHz AMD Opteron processor is coupled with an FPGA, resulting in significant system-level savings for power, space and cost.
The XtremeData coprocessing development system is a complete design environment.
It includes a 2P AMD Opteron processor-based PC with an XD1000 coprocessor module, a reference design containing HyperTransport and DDR interfaces and a JTAG download cable for configuring the FPGA and probing internal FPGA signals using Altera's SignalTap II embedded logic analyser.
Altera and XtremeData are committed to jointly developing libraries and tools that can be easily used by application developers.
The two companies are also working with several leading universities to make the XD1000 available as a research platform to enable additional innovations.
"The XtremeData coprocessor module utilises a commodity-based, system-level solution that enables existing x86 applications to be accelerated at significant cost, power and space savings", said Dr Misha Burich, Altera's Senior Vice President of software and systems engineering.
"Now with XtremeData coprocessors installed into COTS CPU platforms, the algorithmic parts of x86 applications can be easily and flexibly accelerated with FPGAs, via parallelisation and pipelining".
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