ACADEMIA

Mitrionics and Reservoir Labs Collaborate on DARPA SBIR Grant for “Productivity Advancements for Configurable Computing”: Integration of R-Stream Compiler and Mitrion Virtual Processor Goal to Increase Programmability of FPGAs: Mitrionics, Inc., developer of the Mitrion Virtual Processor and software-centric Mitrion-C programming language for FPGA Supercomputing acceleration, and Reservoir Labs, a leading-edge consulting and contract R&D firm to the computer industry and government, today announced a joint development collaboration towards Reservoir’s recently awarded DARPA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) project “Productivity Advancements for Configurable Computing”. Mitrionics and Reservoir Labs will begin the first phase of the project to illustrate productivity enhancements from combining the Mitrionics FPGA Supercomputing development platform and Reservoir Labs’ R-Stream compiler. The scope of the work is to target Reservoir’s advanced R-Stream research compiler to Mitrionics’ Virtual Processor and other widely used FPGA tools such as CHiMPS (Compiling High-Level Languages to Massively Pipelined Systems, a software-like compilation flow). R-Stream provides advanced high-level program optimization and mapping technologies, which in turn enables parallel programming over a distributed heterogeneous architecture (typical of FPGAs). Combining R-Stream with Mitrionics’ Virtual Processor could substantially facilitate the programmability of FPGAs. “Reservoir Labs is pleased to bring over 15 years of experience working on compilers for advanced computing architectures to this project with Mitrionics,” said Richard Lethin, President of Reservoir Labs. “Our high level optimization technologies will allow users to rapidly deploy Mitrionics’ technology for programming FPGAs to achieve significant computational rates and efficiencies for next generation HPC problems.” “Advancing productivity for configurable computing is at the core of what Mitrionics and our Mitrion Platform is all about,” stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. “We’re excited to be collaborating with Reservoir Labs on this project as our technologies are complementary and expertise well-suited to addressing this challenging endeavour.” About R-Stream: R-Stream is a “High Level Compiler” used for mapping embedded signal/knowledge processing applications to advanced computing architectures such as the Cell microprocessor. It is designed to seamlessly plug into target-specific (low-level) C compilers. More specifically, R-Stream is an ANSI C source to source compiler producing high-level mapped code, i.e., C augmented with mapping instructions, from abstract source descriptions of the algorithm. R-Stream advances the scope of programs that can be automatically parallelized, and has features to map to critical hardware attributes in emerging heterogeneous high performance computing chips. Such features include distributed computation over streaming engines, managing local memories, meeting locality of reference requirements to achieve computational intensity, and generating coarse grain communication (e.g. DMA) operations.