AEROSPACE

Cray Inc. today announced that it is working closely with Mitrionics, Inc. of Lund, Sweden, to provide users of the award-winning Cray XD1 supercomputer with a fast and simple way to implement application-accelerating field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. Mitrionics' Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit make it possible for supercomputer users to program FPGAs integrated into the Cray XD1 system on a true software level, reducing the time and effort to take advantage of FPGA-based computation. The Mitrionics solution makes FPGA-driven high-performance computing (HPC) accessible to researchers and engineers who have no hardware design experience. Through the Mitrion Virtual Processor, FPGAs can be programmed purely by software development techniques. This requires much shorter development time than hardware design techniques. The result is "pushbutton" software-programming-to-hardware-performance. Application acceleration with the Mitrion Virtual Processor gives users a powerful tool for making breakthrough discoveries and solving problems in the life sciences, physical sciences and a variety of industries. "A Cray XD1 supercomputer equipped with a Mitrion Virtual Processor provides a powerful yet accessible combination for HPC users," said Mitrionics CEO Anders Dellson. "For users without hardware experience, FPGAs are difficult to program. Even simple computational algorithms can take months to program, resulting in very inflexible designs. With our Mitrion Platform, you don't have to be an electrical engineer to program an FPGA. As few as 180 lines of code in the Mitrion C Programming Language can generate as many as 150,000 lines of VHDL hardware code." "The Cray XD1 system's FPGA-based reconfigurable computing feature turns Virtex 4 FPGAs into tightly integrated co-processors that can be programmed to accelerate key components of some HPC applications far beyond what is possible with scalar processing on microprocessors alone," said Amar Shan, product manager for the Cray XD1 supercomputer. "We are very happy to be collaborating with Mitrionics on tools that make the Cray XD1 application acceleration feature more accessible to users." "With this offering, Cray and Mitrionics are contributing significantly to the advancement of high-performance reconfigurable computing, and to its accessibility by the people who need it the most, namely domain scientists," stated Dr. Tarek El-Ghazawi, a professor of computer engineering and the director of the High-Performance Computing Lab (HPCL) at the George Washington University. "The Cray XD1 supercomputer is an impressive FPGA-equipped system that is complemented by the Mitrionics Platform, a modern high-level programming paradigm, which lets users program FPGAs for acceleration without hardware design knowledge." Advantages of FPGAs Users of a Cray XD1 system equipped with FPGAs are able to accelerate their applications by programming the FPGAs to act like high-speed, specialized co-processors. The FPGA devices take some of the computational load off the main processors by running special subroutines that speed up parts of the application's code. As a result, users can solve complex problems in less time without having to increase the size and power budget of their computing platforms. This performance-enhancing technology is known as reconfigurable computing because the FPGAs can be configured as the application runs to optimize efficiency. Application types that can benefit from this technique include seismic engineering, astrophysics, biotechnology, financial modeling and other compute-intensive areas of study.