ACADEMIA
Mitrionics FPGA-Accelerated Computing Platform Demonstrated at Bio-IT World
Mitrionics, Inc., developer of the Mitrion Software Acceleration Platform and the Mitrion Virtual Processor, today announced it will be presenting and promoting its latest advancements in accelerated computing at the Bio-IT World Conference this April 28-30, 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts. Mitrionics released an upgrade to its SDK, including the Mitrion SDK Personal Edition, a free, downloadable, software development kit (SDK) designed to promote the development of accelerated applications with researchers in life science industries such as bioinformatics, genome informatics and high throughput sequencing. Mitrion-accelerated applications running on the Mitrion Virtual Processor (MVP) provide a dual customer benefit by increasing application performance 20x to 60x or greater when used with Intel and AMD processors while using ninety percent less power consumption than traditional systems. Mitrionics will be located in booth #306/308 with its partner SGI. “The genomics industry is at the forefront for the adoption, development, and implementation of accelerated computing technologies and applications,” said Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, “Our free, Mitrion SDK Personal Edition is designed to help build a healthy bio-centric ecosystem for FPGA-based Accelerated Computing and Green Computing.” Mitrionics has achieved a number of milestones in the accelerated computing industry over the past 18 months including: running its open source Mitrion-accelerated BLASTn on a 70 FPGA cluster, achieving up to 900x performance increase versus commodity clusters, the establishment of the Mitrion Open Bio Project, and selection by a number of leading global research organizations customers for its accelerated BLASTn software. In the past year, numerous accelerated computing hardware platforms have been introduced into the market but a problem existed in fully utilizing them. Mitrionics fills the gap with broad accessibility to a development platform enabling software acceleration that researchers and software developers can use immediately. “Our customers are pleased to see processor companies Intel and AMD, and system vendors SGI and HP increase their support for FPGA accelerated computers. Mitrionics solves the previous problem with programming FPGAs,” said Mike Calise, executive vice president of Mitrionics, Inc. Mitrion SDK PE
The Mitrion SDK Personal Edition (PE) will allow researchers, scientists, developers, institutions, and independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop and accelerate a wide range of high performance computing applications to run on the Mitrion Virtual Processor (MVP) configured on FPGA-based computer systems. The software-centric Mitrion SDK is the fastest and easiest way to accelerate an application’s performance by programming the computationally intensive part of the application to run on an FPGA. The Mitrion SDK is different from other FPGA programming solutions because it requires absolutely no hardware design skills or experience. The Mitrion Software Development Kit Personal Edition is a free version of the Mitrion SDK that allows the developer to start developing accelerated applications for the MVP ahead of FPGA hardware. The Mitrion SDK PE is a complete development environment for Mitrion-C applications. It includes an IDE, a Mitrion-C compiler and a graphical debugger. It does not, however, include the capability to generate Mitrion Virtual Processors that will run in FPGA hardware. To do this, the commercial version Mitrion SDK is required. The Mitrion SDK PE can be downloaded for free at its Web site.