Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Altera Europe
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 28 August 2006
University programme promotes FPGA
coprocessing
Altera has set up a new university programme to support academic research into high-performance computing.
Altera has set up a new university programme to support academic research into high-performance computing AMD, Sun Microsystems and XtremeData are participating in the programme that will donate US $1 million in workstations and development software to universities
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 Jun 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
Handsets ease ticketing process
MAX IIZ CPLDs manage several peripherals in the P1200 handsets, including an RFID reader, an infra-red data association (IRDA) sensor, a Bluetooth interface and LED control.
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%.
Using the workstations, participating universities will be able to research and drive the adoption of FPGA coprocessing for high-performance computing applications such as medical imaging, data analytics, text searches, network security, bioinformatics and energy.
"Supporting academic research into new applications and architectures is a clear demonstration of the benefits of the open and collaborative model of Torrenza, AMD's extensible system bus programme", said Doug O'Flaherty of the Advanced Technologies Group at AMD.
"This programme is exactly what we envisioned when we developed the open-architecture project, giving developers the freedom to take high-performance computing to the next level".
Further reading
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.
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.
Low-cost FPGAs are enhanced for communications
Increased performance transceivers drive serial interfaces at speeds from 600Mbit/s to 3.125Gbit/s and reduce static power consumption by up to 20%.
"Our Sun Ultra 40 is the workstation-of-choice for many energy, government, defense, and scientific research applications", said Marc Hamilton, Director HPC Solutions at Sun Microsystems.
"For many of these applications, FPGA coprocessing can provide further performance acceleration along with power and space savings".
Twenty Sun Ultra 40 workstations, each powered by single or dual-core AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture and an XtremeData XD1000 FPGA coprocessor module, are being made available under the programme.
The XD1000 coprocessor module includes Altera's largest Stratix II FPGA, the EP2S180.
The FPGA module is pin-compatible with an AMD Opteron processor and allows researchers to speed up algorithms running on the Sun platform by up to 100 times and applications by up to 10 times.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, home of many of the earliest and largest computer systems since 1952, is the first university to receive workstations through the programme.
The workstations will complement the "Trusted Illiac", a 500-processor programmable hardware/software cluster that uses FPGA coprocessors to make large-scale computing more reliable and secure.
"This combined effort creates a valuable new programme that we can immediately begin leveraging for our high-performance secure computing research", said Professor Wen-mei Hwu, holder of the Jerry Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and leader of the Embedded and Enterprise Systems Theme of Illinois' Information Trust Institute.
"Research results derived from the donated systems will aid the commercial adoption of FPGA coprocessing".
"We see FPGAs as an essential component of next-generation parallel computing systems because programmable logic provides the unique capability to customise and accelerate both computation and memory system behaviour", said Professor Kunle Olukotun, of Stanford University's Computer Systems Lab.
"FPGAs are particularly valuable in a computer system's research environment because they allow new architecture ideas to be evaluated at hardware speeds".
"Universities will apply these systems to accelerate applications with this new FPGA coprocessor model", said Mike Strickland, Director Strategic and Technical Marketing for Altera's Computer and Storage business unit.
"This co-operation results in a robust solution which is of immediate value to many research programmes".
Applications to this university programme can be made through the XtremeData or Altera websites.
On selection, complete development systems will be made available to research recipients.
Multiple system donations to individual research teams are planned.
• Altera Europe: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Electronicstalk email newsletter
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
