McGill University Uses Mitrion Platform for Teaching Graduate Level Parallel Programming: Mitrionics, Inc., developer of the Mitrion Software Acceleration Platform and the Mitrion Virtual Processor, today announced the release of a new version of its Mitrion Software Development Kit (SDK), The new version, includes significant improvements to the Mitrion Virtual Processor (MVP) that enable a faster and more efficient synthesis/place & route process. The new SDK also includes new programming examples written in Mitrion-C and revised documentation, making it easier to get started writing FPGA-accelerated applications. Students, professors and developers can access these new improvements to the SDK free of charge, by downloading the Mitrion SKD PE from the company’s Web site: www.mitrionics.com/forum. Mitrion-accelerated applications running on the Mitrion Virtual Processor provide a dual customer benefit by increasing application performance up to 60x or greater over traditional processors while using ninety percent less power consumption than traditional system clusters. Accelerated applications have strong potential to impact a broad range of industries such as financial, imaging, seismology, and encryption, and especially life sciences, in areas such as bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular modeling and genomics. Mitrionics has developed an accelerated version of the NCBI BLAST bioinformatics application and has made it available to the industry as an open source application. “Acceleration technologies, platforms, and products are being accepted into the mainstream by global industry leaders like Intel, AMD, Xilinx, SGI, Cray, and others,” said Mike Calise, executive vice president and general manager of Mitrionics, Inc. “Parallel programming is a main component for all accelerated computing and shortage of software developers with parallel programming knowledge is about to become a bottle neck. By offering our free hardware independent Mitrion SDK PE to academic institutions world wide we hope to bridge this gap.” “We taught parallel programming using the Mitrion Platform during the past two fall semesters as part of our graduate-level coursework,” said Warren Gross, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University. “The Mitrion-C programming language is well suited for teaching because it is very software centric, and the students were able to successfully develop an accelerated application as part of their course grade.” Mitrion SDK PE The Mitrion Software Development Kit Personal Edition is a free version of the Mitrion SDK that allows the development of accelerated applications for the Mitrion Virtual Processor without access to FPGA hardware. The Mitrion SDK PE includes a Mitrion-C compiler and a graphical debugger and is a complete development environment for accelerating applications. The Mitrion SDK PE does not 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 provides the ability to: - write and debug Mitrion-C applications for the Mitrion Virtual Processor -simulate their interaction with programs running on the host CPU -determine their actual performance on different FPGA platforms Mitrion-C: The Mitrion-C programming language is an implicitly parallel programming language with syntax very similar to C. With Mitrion-C it is easy for programmers to learn how to write software that takes advantage of all the parallelism available from the Mitrion Virtual Processor. Mitrion Compiler and Debugger: The Mitrion Debugger is a graphical debugger and code-simulator. It simplifies finding programming errors, performance bottlenecks and inefficient code. The Mitrion SDK PE is supported on Linux/UNIX, Windows and Mac OS X.