Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: Mitrionics
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 23 March 2007
FPGA supercomputing earns Top BioIT
award
Reconfigurable accelerator boards based on FPGA technology have been ranked among the Top Ten BioIT trends for 2007 as published by the industry publication BioIT World.
Work carried out by SGI and Mitrionics has been named as one of the Top Ten BioIT Trends for 2007 published in the industry publication BioIT World SGI's Altix family of servers is based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) processor technology and SGI RASC RC100 computation blades
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 14 Oct 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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The revolutionary new Mitrion platform makes supercomputing performance accessible to a broader market of scientists, researchers and software developers.
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New diagnostics and optimisation features allow users to shorten development times by troubleshooting, debugging and optimising Mitrion processor designs before FPGA synthesis.
Mitrion is developer of the Mitrion Virtual Processor and software-centric Mitrion-C programming language for FPGA Supercomputing acceleration.
Compiled by the BioTeam, a consulting collective dedicated to delivering vendor-agnostic informatics solutions to the life-sciences industry, the Top Ten list of BioIT trends has placed at number 5 "Reconfigurable Accelerator Boards (FPGAs)", an area in which Mitrionics and SGI collaborate and for which they were both mentioned in the report.
"The list is totally unordered, so being number 5 is not necessarily different than being 3 or being 8", says Christopher Dwan, BioTeam Principal Investigator, who recommended the addition of FPGAs to the BioIT Trends list".
Further reading
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.
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.
"Reconfigurable computing devices occupy this interesting ground between absolute standard CPUs and completely custom computing hardware".
"In a number of cases, they have been shown to deliver substantial improvements in performance, price/performance and power consumption"".
"Additionally, the collaborative efforts of SGI and Mitrionics directly address the number 1 Top Ten BioIT Trend for 2007 - which is "Power and Cooling Costs".
SGI and Mitrionics are the leaders in the expanding market of FPGA Supercomputing - where applications are modified to be accelerated (10x to 100x) on computer systems using FPGAs.
Mitrionics has also accelerated the NCBI Blast bioinformatics application and is delivering that as a turnkey solution worldwide with SGI.
"Reconfigurable Accelerator Boards (FPGAs) - FPGA technology has been the 'next big thing' in bioinformatics for a while, and 2007 will be no exception" says Dwan.
SGI is including an FPGA offering in its new product line, and companies like Mitrionics are providing a development environment, which will support expanded use.
As the computational load required for genomics becomes more stable, specific common tools like Blast will be moved to dedicated, special purpose hardware.
"For about the past six or seven years I've been going to the Supercomputing conference; I've seen reconfigurable devices like the FPGAs and they've been lacking two critical parts", says Dwan.
"One: they are more difficult to use than general processors because you have to put in a lot more effort to build out this custom thing to get essentially the same result, except that same result is going to be faster".
"FPGAs have been lacking either an easy way for its users to do that, or an established person in the middle who builds out the specific tool for the specific application area, at least in the life sciences".
"This year at Supercomputing '06, I saw several companies stepping into that gap, specifically Mitrionics, coming out with their compiler libraries and all sorts of expertise in various scientific domains", continues Dwan.
"It strikes me as exactly what is needed in order to turn FPGAs from a potentially useful technology into something where, in a year, we're going to be saying 'Wow! Why didn't anybody do that sooner?'".
"The second factor that I saw is the partnership with major hardware vendors, and by hardware vendors I mean the people who, at the end of the day, sell hardware to customers", says Dwan.
"Instead of vendors viewing this technology as a competition to their core chip business as in the past, SGI and some others are seeing it as a value-add that makes the product offering more powerful".
"People are going to buy a particular brand because of the support, because of the reliability, and also because the product is tightly integrated and partnered with these reconfigurable accelerator boards".
"I've been saying, 'Wow, FPGAs are going to be the next big thing' forever".
"I think it's this year".
"It seems to me that Mitrionics and SGI finally see the two pieces that were missing in the stack".
"I think we're going to start seeing some really interesting products".
A typical 1U server costs US $1 to $2 per day to both heat (provide computing) and cool.
On the surface this may not seem like much.
However, annually this adds up to a typical 42U rack consuming $30,000 in electricity and the generation of CO2 equivalent to having burned 4,000 gallons of gasoline.
These factors (among others) are driving hardware manufacturers to increase the number of FLOPS/W.
The introduction of the two- and four-core processors dramatically increase the number of FLOPS/W.
"We believe our accelerated turnkey bioinformatics solutions, currently offered in conjunction with our close partner SGI, are going to dramatically increase the market adoption of real-world, FPGA-accelerated systems and applications in 2007", says Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics.
"Customers from around the globe have shown strong interest in our Mitrion-accelerated Blast, and we're following that up with additional Blast versions, and other applications for bioinformatics".
"Mitrionics is also very involved in developing or co-developing FPGA-accelerated applications for a variety of industry segments as well as government and scientific projects".
"The success SGI and Mitrionics are having in FPGA Supercomputing really demonstrates what can be accomplished when you have two companies in the right places, at the right time, working together".
"An FPGA draws one-quarter to one-third the power of a CPU, and yet can generate results more rapidly", says Michael Brown, Sciences Segment Manager at SGI.
"The combination of higher performance with lower power consumption will figure heavily in purchasing decisions in the sciences and other industries".
"Scientists are already using SGI RASC capabilities to effectively obtain results from the mountains of genomic data being generated by next generation genome sequencers".
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