FPGA accelerators gain C compiler support

Tools provide users with a familiar, easy-to-use design environment for creating high-performance FPGA accelerator applications using ANSI-C.

Nallatech and Impulse Accelerated Technologies have announced the availability of the Impulse C compiler for the Nallatech H100 series of FPGA accelerator products.

Built with the goal of simplifying the design of scalable clusters, Nallatech's H100 series delivers improved price/performance, increased performance density and reduced power consumption for high performance computing users across a range of market sectors including financial services, geosciences and bioinformatics.

Customers can efficiently scale from a single FPGA processor to an architecture using hundreds of FPGAs as part of an integrated solution targeting IBM Blade Centres.

The H100 series is a key element of Nallatech's overall product strategy for 2007, which will include the launch of the Intel FSB FPGA Accelerator product family in the fourth quarter.

The Impulse CoDeveloper tools provide users with a familiar, easy-to-use design environment for creating high-performance FPGA accelerator applications using ANSI-C.

The Impulse tools allow FPGA algorithms to be developed and debugged using popular C/C++ development environments, including Microsoft Visual Studio and GCC-based tools.

The CoDeveloper software-to-hardware compiler translates C-language processes to low-level FPGA-hardware, while optimising the generated logic and identifying opportunities for parallelism.

The compiler analyses untimed C code and schedules multiple statements and operations into single-clock instruction stages.

CoDeveloper unrolls loops and generates loop pipelines to exploit the extreme levels of parallelism possible in an FPGA.

Used in conjunction with the Nallatech H100 series C-to-executable tool flow, customers wishing to exploit the benefits of FPGAs are able to create massively parallel applications targeting the latest FPGA hardware platforms from Nallatech.

"We are delighted to announce support for the Impulse C design tools as part of the Nallatech H100 series product family", said Craig Anderson, CEO of Nallatech.

"Impulse is recognised as one of the leading suppliers of C-based design tools providing a reliable, easy-to-use path from high-level software algorithms onto FPGA-accelerated platforms".

"As well as offering customers a choice of C compilers, the Nallatech-Impulse relationship validates the demand for accelerated processing capabilities and further strengthens the FPGA ecosystem for high performance computing users".

"Impulse is pleased to announce support for the Nallatech H100 series of FPGA products providing users with a platform to quickly experiment with alternate algorithm configurations that can be scaled up as required", said Brian Durwood, CEO of Impulse.

"We believe that this modular and reconfigurable approach to processing matches the key requirements of finance, bioinformatics, and general high-bandwidth processing markets".

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