Cray XT5 family of supercomputers includes hybrid blade featuring DRC’s RPU: DRC Computer Corporation, the leading provider of dynamically reconfigurable coprocessor modules, today announced that global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. will include DRC’s Reconfigurable Processor Unit (RPU) in an optional reconfigurable computing blade in its newly launched hybrid supercomputer, the Cray XT5h system. DRC’s RPU will deliver dramatic performance advantage for HPC applications. Incorporating multiple processing technologies on a common infrastructure, the Cray XT5h system—part of the new Cray XT5 family of supercomputers—is the industry’s first integrated hybrid supercomputer. Featuring DRC’s RPU, the Cray XR1 reconfigurable computing blade offers an efficient high-performance computing alternative for customers looking to achieve maximum computation performance, often enabling previously intractable applications. “The Cray XT5h system will enable end-users to assign coprocessors to applications, yielding faster, more efficient results,” explains Jan Silverman, senior vice president, corporate strategy and business development for Cray. “At the heart of our reconfigurable processing blade, DRC’s RPU can deliver performance gains of 10 to 100 times on a number of applications, such as signal and image processing, seismic processing, bioinformatics, and econometric processing, dramatically accelerating the pace of scientific and engineering discovery.” Tightly integrated into the Cray XT5h system, the module plugs directly into an open processor socket in a multi-way AMD Opteron system to provide direct access to adjacent double data-rate (DDR) memory and Opteron processors at HyperTransport speed and latency. A 6.4 GB/second direct connection between the Opteron processor and the Cray SeaStar2+ interconnect network further reduces latency to provide the highest performance available for compute-intensive applications. "In a recent IDC study, close to one-third of the HPC users interviewed said that they plan to acquire accelerators, and FPGAs were the most popular choice," said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for Technical Computing. "Because standard multi-core microprocessors are not enabling a number of important classes of applications to run fast enough, the HPC market is looking at hybrid computers that include other types of processors for an increase in performance. It's not surprising that the new Cray XT5h hybrid supercomputer includes an FPGA option from DRC Computer. Cray has experience with FPGAs and DRC’s standard, commercial off-the-shelf RPU is designed to be easily upgradeable as new, rapidly-improving FPGA technologies emerge.” “We are honored to play a strategic role in Cray’s ongoing effort to find new and better ways to solve compute-intensive scientific and engineering problems,” says Larry Laurich, president and CEO of DRC Computer. “The launch of the Cray XT5 h family of supercomputers, including the Cray SeaStar2+ fabric and the DRC reconfigurable coprocessors, provides the most powerful and scalable reconfigurable hybrid computing infrastructure available in the industry today.” The DRC RPU features the largest FPGA on the market, the Virtex-4 LX200 device from Xilinx, Inc. The DRC RPU110-L200 model enables greater application acceleration in three ways: it provides an abundance of compute resources, it provides 4 GB of the main board memory to deliver more than 6.25 GB/second of memory bandwidth, and the HyperTransport between the Opteron and the RPU110-L200 sustains speeds up to 2.5 GB/second. For application development, DRC has teamed with Cray to offer the development system model DS/XT. This system represents a Cray XR1 node very closely, with one Opteron and two RPUs. Offered with MPI across multiple systems, the system provides an environment with multi-node application development and debugging. The Xilinx ISE 9.2 comes standard and is included with the system. All major vendors of FPGA development tools support the RPU platform including Celoxica, DSPlogic, Impulse Accelerated Technologies, Mitrionics, and Synplicity and are offered as options that can be ordered with packaged pricing.