Product category:
Design and Development Hardware
News Release from: Nallatech
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 11 November 2004
Platform for algorithm accelerator
design tool
Mitrionics has selected the Nallatech BenNUEY family of FPGA-based processing systems as the development platform for its Mitrion design environment for High Performance Computing systems.
Mitrionics AB of Lund, Sweden has selected the Nallatech BenNUEY family of FPGA-based processing systems as the development platform for its Mitrion design environment for High Performance Computing systems "We chose Nallatech's solution because they provided us with a very smooth path to add FPGA processing to conventional computing environments
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 26 Apr 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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There was minimum effort and resource required to complete the platform, as everything from drivers to host communication was taken care of," said Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics.
He continued, "What's more the Nallatech platforms work; the documentation is accurate and they deliver the promised performance - something which we have found is not always the case with alternatives." The Mitrion design tools enable scientists and engineers with programming skills to exploit the power of parallel processing in FPGAs, giving them supercomputer performance for their algorithms, in desktop computers, without needing to design custom hardware.
In typical applications such as computer vision, gene sequencing, Blast analysis, biological simulations and encryption, the complexity and scope of the computer analyses being performed requires massive processing power and flexibility.
Further reading
FPGA-centric platform for a terabit future
The Benera is a reconfigurable computing platform that Nallatech claims takes FPGA systems to TeraOPS performance.
FPGA cores aim to beat DSPs at floating point
Nallatech has launched a fully IEEE754-compliant single-precision floating-point core library which now allows Xilinx's FPGAs to exceed the floating-point performance of the latest DSPs.
Entry-level FPGA development protects investment
Nallatech is now shipping its first FPGA development kit: the Strathnuey is based on a single-slot motherboard with Xilinx Virtex-II FPGAs.
Using the Mitrion design suite and the Nallatech platform to implement the user's algorithms customers are already reporting order-of-magnitude performance improvements spending only weeks on the implementation.
Recent successes have included achieving a 30x speed increase in the operation of a gene identification algorithm and delivering over 50x more processing power for FFT related tasks in workstations.
In a pharmaceutical image processing application, Mitrion's technology helped reduce a 5.5 day analysis task to an overnight operation.
"The scientist, engineers and mathematicians in these HPC environments would rather spend their time trying new approaches to problems and optimising algorithms than designing the software and hardware systems that these analysis tools run on," said Dr Malachy Devlin, Nallatech's Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.
"Using the Mitrion tools to access the parallel processing capabilities of our FPGA-based platforms frees up valuable time for researchers and due to the reconfigurable nature of the technology removes the constraints of dedicated hardware, enabling the iterative improvements and continuous exploration of ideas that can lead to breakthroughs." The Mitrion Development Environment The Mitrion Development Kit from Mitrionics AB includes a compiler, graphical debugger and code-simulator.
The compiler is a fast and simple command-line tool that compiles a typical Mitrion-c program in seconds.
It automatically creates c/C++ header-files with the correct function prototype for easy integration with non-Mitrion code.
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-c compiler and debugger are compatible with Solaris, Linux and Windows.
Third-party tools are used for Synthesis and Place and Route.
The Nallatech Platform The BenNUEY platform makes full use of Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs to offer users a vast processing resource with which to implement complex algorithms.
Key features of the Virtex-II Pro family include Multi-Gbit Transceivers, dedicated PowerPC processor cores and increased memory capacity compared to the Xilinx Virtex-II range, making it ideal for the most demanding computational operations.
As part of Nallatech's DIME-II range, the BenNUEY processing boards provide full support for all DIME-II modules, three of which can be housed on the BenNUEY at any time.
The DIME-II modules feature a module-to-motherboard bandwidth of up to 10Gbyte/s, meaning that users can easily scale their system to meet the needs of the most demanding applications without having performance compromised by I/O bottlenecks.
Support for industry-standard form factors and interfaces ensure easy communication with and integration to existing systems.
All products are fully supported by Nallatech's FUSE Reconfigurable Computer Operating System and DIMEtalk.
Demonstration Mitrion will be demonstrated on Nallatech's booth (#1394) at SC2004 in Pittsburgh 6th to 12th November 2004.
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