ACADEMIA

SRC Computers, Inc., a leader in reconfigurable computing systems, announced the availability of its SRC-7 general purpose system featuring the first reconfigurable processor with IEEE compliant floating point blocks and accompanying high bandwidth interconnect. The lack of dedicated low latency floating point capability with enough memory bandwidth to prevent stalling has historically been viewed as the last technical barrier to widespread adoption of general purpose reconfigurable computing. The SRC-7 succeeds the SRC-6 and provides the most powerful, programmer-friendly, reconfigurable, high performance system on the market. SRC’s Carte programming environment allows programmers to use standard ANSI C and Fortran to program its reconfigurable MAP processors with no need for hardware design expertise. The announcement of the SRC-7 was made at the High Performance Reconfigurable Computing Workshop being held at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. The increased performance of the SRC-7 series H MAP reconfigurable processors is highlighted by: • The first dedicated reconfigurable double precision floating point capability with o 112 double precision floating point operations per clock per processor; and o 224 single precision floating point operations per clock per processor. • The highest per processor… o Floating point performance; o Sustained external memory payload bandwidth at 14.4 Gbytes per second; o Sustained on-board SRAM payload bandwidth at 24 Gbytes per second; and o Sustained direct GPIO payload bandwidth at 10.3 Gbytes per second. • The largest per processor… o On-board SRAM at 80 Mbytes; o Total on board memory at 2 Gbytes; and o Reconfigurable logic capacity at 64 Mgates. • The capability for high bandwidth mass storage… o Sustained disk bandwidth 3.6 Gbytes per second; o 10K random IOPS per assembly; o 32 Terabytes per assembly; o Accessible directly from MAP; and o Addressable through the system’s 64-bit virtual address space. “Once again SRC is showing the way in the world of reconfigurable computing,” said Dr. Duncan A. Buell, Interim Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of South Carolina. “Previous machines were sometimes memory access limited for parallel applications. But with its high bandwidth interconnect, large volume of close memory, plenty of parallel memory references, and dedicated floating point units, the SRC-7 is very impressive and possibly the most powerful reconfigurable machine for general purpose computation.” Dr. Jeff Vetter, Future Technologies Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory commented, “Since the installation of the first SRC system with MAP here in 1999, and more recently with our purchase of an SRC-6, ORNL has been investigating the applicability of reconfigurable processing to computational science. We are currently working to port a variety of biology and nanoscience applications to the SRC-6 and believe that the SRC-7 is designed to deliver unprecedented floating-point performance for key scientific applications.” The SRC-7 product line includes large-scale multi-processor systems, the MAPstation line of workstations, portable highperformance systems, and embedded offerings. The first SRC-7 MAPstations are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2006, with large-scale systems and servers following in the first half of 2006. SRC will continue to offer and support the SRC-6 series based on customer demand, and applications developed for SRC-6 systems are software compatible with the SRC-7. SRC systems are currently employed in a variety of market segments including defense, energy, scientific research, intelligence, molecular dynamics, bio-informatics, biometrics, image processing, real-time sensor processing, and geospatial mapping. “Since 2002, when we shipped our first SRC-6 system with Carte, programmers have been able to control both commodity and reconfigurable processors, using standard high level languages such as C, and attain orders of magnitude more performance,” said Jon Huppenthal, President and CEO of SRC. “With the introduction of the SRC-7, SRC clearly takes a commanding lead in all aspects of general purpose reconfigurable computing.” SRC is the only reconfigurable system vendor that provides this tightly integrated high-level language programming environment with both development and debug capability. As with the current SRC-6 product line, no hardware design knowledge is required by the programmer to use the SRC-7.