ACADEMIA

Microway and DRC Computer Corporation today join forces to deliver superior processing power to High Performance Computing (HPC) users. Microway’s Linux-based NumberSmasher-RPU systems will now use both dual-core AMD Opteron processors and DRC’s RPUs (Reprogrammable Processor Units). These new systems provide high value through a savings on space, heat generation and power consumption and deliver a competitively priced, scalable, high-performance platform for scientific applications. “We are delighted to be working closely with Microway to provide the industry’s largest and most powerful RPU in the company’s scalable, high performance platforms,” said Larry Laurich, CEO at DRC. “We are excited to be able to show the quantifiable advantages of this solution at this year’s Supercomputing trade show taking place in Tampa Florida.” “The DRC RPU contains specialized cells that can be used to accelerate numeric tasks which work on arrays stored in the memory address space of an AMD Opteron,” commented Stephen Fried, Microway’s President and CTO. “Reconfigurable processors have had a strong historic advantage in signal processing applications, which they can today perform at up to one hundred times faster than ordinary CISC processors. This is accomplished by incorporating specialized cells which contain the building blocks needed to carry out both integer and floating point arithmetic. With 96 such cells on chip, it becomes possible to perform both SIMD and pipelined parallel operations at very high speeds. These operations can be integrated with Opteron applications that communicate with the coprocessor using the message passing interface sent over the HTX bus that drive the FPGA using code generated by tools that start with kernels written in C. An exciting feature of the coprocessor, is its ability to execute vector primitive kernels using the built-in 2 MB SRAM cache as a vector register. This approach makes it possible to use the tools employed by Microway in the past to drive vector processors like the i860, while at the same time enabling historic vectorization tools like VAST, that can automatically convert serial Fortran codes into Fortran programs that utilize vector FPGA primitives. ” DRC’ makes a coprocessor module that plugs into a standard multi-processor AMD Opteron system, providing direct access to adjacent DDR memory and Opteron processors at HyperTransport speed and nanosecond latency. Tight coupling between CPU and memory means that bandwidth and latency bottlenecks are virtually eliminated. These benefits apply to the full range of high-performance computing systems, from entry level to the world’s largest supercomputers. Microway's Linux-based NumberSmasher-RPU provides a complete solution for developing and deploying clusters of servers with a mix of CPUs and RPUs solving the world’s most compute intensive problems. Microway’s integrated remote monitoring and advanced manageability features have been refined over years of development and hundreds of real-world cluster deployments. The NumberSmasher-RPU systems will start shipping immediately. A complete product description can be found at its Web site. The DRC RPU will be showcased in the Microway booth, # 402, and the AMD booth, # 1413, at the Supercomputing Tradeshow in Tampa Florida, November 11 – 17th, 2006.