Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Mitrionics | Subject: Mitrion Virtual Processor and SDK
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 14 October 2005
Platform promises FPGA-based
supercomputing
The revolutionary new Mitrion platform makes supercomputing performance accessible to a broader market of scientists, researchers and software developers.
Mitrionics has announced the general availability of its revolutionary new Mitrion platform that makes supercomputing performance (10-to-100 times faster than traditional processors) accessible to a broader market of scientists, researchers and software developers Already tested and selected by numerous supercomputing industry leaders, the Mitrion Virtual Processor and Software Development Kit allow supercomputing software to be written to run on FPGAs faster, easier, and more affordably than any other development solution
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 14 Feb 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
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Dev kit gets FPGA designs right before synthesis
New diagnostics and optimisation features allow users to shorten development times by troubleshooting, debugging and optimising Mitrion processor designs before FPGA synthesis.
Supercomputing platform upgrades to latest FPGAs
The Mitrion Platform, consisting of the Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit, now fully supports Xilinx Virtex-4 Platform FPGAs.
Before Mitrionics, FPGAs had the ability to run supercomputing applications, but it was prohibitively difficult and complex to program them using the traditional existing hardware design tools.
Mitrionics' revolutionary technology has removed the barriers of high cost, extreme complexity, and long development times to make supercomputing performance accessible to entirely new markets and segments of scientists and developers.
Using the Mitrion C programming language, a mere 180 lines of code can generate 150,000 lines of VHDL.
Further reading
Platform supports Silicon Graphics blade
The Mitrion Platform now supports the new SGI RASC RC100 computation blade, built with dual Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs.
FPGA supercomputing on the curriculum
The Mitrion Platform has been used during the fall 2006 semester at McGill University to teach graduate level students parallel programming techniques for application acceleration using FPGAs.
Software environment aids FPGA supercomputing
Software developer's kit includes the Xilinx Integrated Software Environment (ISE) design suite.
"The Mitrion platform will make a significant contribution to the growth of high performance computing by making reconfigurable computing more accessible and affordable for scientists, researchers and developers", stated Kevin L Wohlever, Director of the Springfield Operations for the Ohio Supercomputer Center.
"It is exciting to see the successful emergence of FPGAs-based performance acceleration being promoted and adopted by so many companies, organisations, and industry leaders".
"The Mitrionics platform has been recognised as a major development breakthrough and selected by the leading supercomputing industry players", stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics.
"This is a very exciting time and the beginning of an entirely new technology and market segment".
"Now that the main technical barrier in programming FPGAs for supercomputing performance acceleration has been solved, we anticipate the growth in this emerging market to accelerate greatly".
The Mitrionics platform has been selected by many of the world's leading supercomputing organisations to develop FPGA-based supercomputing applications.
Its first users include: George Mason University; George Washington University; McGill University; the National Cancer Institute; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; the Ohio Supercomputer Center; Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Stockholm Bioinformatics Center; and Zuse Institute Berlin.
The Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit provide a unique solution that makes it possible to develop supercomputing applications for FPGAs on a true software level.
This dramatically reduces the total cost for FPGA-based software acceleration, and more importantly, enables the whole supercomputing industry to benefit from FPGAs.
The Mitrion platform is currently supported for the following FPGA based systems: Cray XD1; Nallatech BenData PCI boards; and SGI RASC Technology.
And more systems are added continuously.
Mitrionics' technology allows software to be developed with an effort comparable to developing applications for OpenMP or MPI.
This allows development time to encompass a matter of days or weeks rather than months or years as with other solutions.
The significantly reduced number of hours spent programming with Mitrion makes supercomputing performance accessible and affordable for many companies not able to use other solutions.
Migrating a Mitrion application across different FPGA based computers is very easy.
This is also the case when upgrading to new FPGA generations: with the Mitrion Software Development Kit, it is simply a matter of a "pushbutton" reconfiguration of the Mitrion Virtual Processor to take advantage of the features of the new FPGA.
Hardware design tools would require a complete rewrite of the application.
The Mitrion Virtual Processor is a fine-grain, massively parallel, configurable soft-core processor.
Software written in the Mitrion-C programming language is compiled into a configuration of the processor.
The configured Mitrion Virtual Processor is then downloaded and run on the target FPGA.
The processor completely separates the software from the FPGA hardware it is running on.
This makes writing software to run in FPGAs quick, easy, and flexible by enabling developers to implement and test algorithms strictly using a high-level software approach.
The Mitrion software development kit includes a compiler, graphical debugger and code simulator, and processor configurator.
A C/C++ library is included for easy integration with the application running on the host CPU.
The debugger gives the programmer a hierarchical view of all the parallel processes and their interactions making it easy to find programming errors, performance bottlenecks and inefficient code.
All the common debugging tools, such as watchpoints, breakpoints and call-dependencies are included.
The Mitrion Software Development Kit runs under all major operating systems including Linux and Windows.
The exceptional application performance acceleration achieved through the Mitrion platform comes from massively parallel execution at the most fine grain level of the algorithm, made possible by the unique features of the Mitrion Virtual Processor architecture.
The Mitrion-C programming language and the simulator help the programmer in preserving and revealing parallelism inherent to the algorithm.
The Mitrion Virtual Processor is then adapted to optimally use the FPGA surface, using processing resources where they are best needed for the specific algorithm.
Virtually any industry that currently utilises supercomputing applications are targets of the Mitrion platform.
Industries that have significant computational needs using regular CPUs, are struggling with a lack of speed, have massive power requirements, or have high costs of building large clusters, will benefit from the Mitrion platform.
Key application areas include genomics, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, manufacturing, aerospace and financial.
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