FPGA-based boards boost BladeCenter performance

Nallatech has announced a family of high performance computing offerings designed to be hosted in IBM's BladeCenter applications.

Nallatech has announced a family of high performance computing (HPC) offerings designed to be hosted in IBM's BladeCenter applications, including financial modelling, seismic processing and academic research.

The new products simplify the design of scalable clusters while lowering cost, reducing complexity and increasing performance.

Nallatech's new FPGA-based HPC product family, specifically the IBM Blade-based accelerator card H102, will be introduced this week at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2006 in Dresden, Germany.

Built with the goal of simplifying the design of scalable clusters, Nallatech's FPGA-based HPC product family provides the most flexible solution available on the market today.

Customers can efficiently scale from a solution based on a single FPGA processor to an architecture utilising hundreds of FPGAs and use the flexibility of options to a wide range of computationally intensive applications.

Nallatech, backed by venture capitalists 3i and Scottish Equity Partners, joined the Power.org community through IBM's venture capital network.

3i has worked with IBM, other established IT companies and several start-ups to grow this open hardware ecosystem for many years and became a founding member of the first Power.org VC Advisory Board in late 2005.

"Nallatech's new offerings show that the open hardware ecosystem is alive, well and growing", said Dr Juan-Antonio Carballo, partner, IBM Venture Capital Group.

"Nallatech has selected IBM System and BladeCenter products as the computing platform of choice for its HPC family of products", said Allan Cantle, President and founder of Nallatech.

"IBM's computing platform was the obvious choice as the host for Nallatech's HPC FPGA computing solutions".

"It allows our products to have tight integration with other computing system components which has the largest install base in the HPC community".

The first available member of the HPC family is the H102 IBM Blade based product with two reconfigurable nodes, offering sustained performance figures of 16GFLOPS in double precision floating point and 50GFLOPS in single precision floating point.

Nallatech has been the world leader in multiple-FPGA-based computing for over a decade.

This expertise has allowed Nallatech to move into the HPC market and produce a computing platform that can scale from few to many reconfigurable computing nodes in a single IBM 7U BladeCenter chassis.

Customers benefit from having access to a system that is designed to provide increased flexibility, improved performance, reduced power and space savings.

This HPC family of products also comes with a dedicated tool flow allowing C programmers to easily programme the hardware.

This enabling tool flow takes care of all the compilation through to the actual code running on the system, removing the need for the programmer to have any detailed knowledge of FPGA technology.

Nallatech's tool flow also supports other third-party compilers including Matlab, Impulse-C and Mitrion thus providing customers with more flexibility and choice.

"I am delighted that FPGA technology from an industry leader such as Nallatech is being tightly integrated into IBM System and BladeCenter products", said Wendy McGee, Director of Linux Clusters Business Unit, IBM Systems and Technology Group director of System and Linux Clusters, IBM Systems and Technology Group.

"There is clearly a lot of interest in FPGA computing within the HPC community and Nallatech products allow IBM's customers to easily integrate this technology into their HPC clusters".

"In my early participation with Power.org I noticed that a lot of industry leaders at various events were using FPGAs to experiment with different custom compute solutions for the various applications", said Nigel Beck, Vice President, Technology Marketing, IBM Technology Collaboration Solutions and chairman of Power.org.

"This family of products from Nallatech will allow users to use and integrate this technology, and should enable them to make early production units to test market feasibility for brand new silicon in the Power.org community".

The H102 IBM Blade based range will be available for shipment in Q3 of 2006.

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