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Pico Computing announced that it will be offering new parallel processor IP for its FPGA boards. The first application of this technology in the area is in the area of Bioinformatics will be on display at Supercomputing '12 in Salt Lake City, November 12-15.

The IP is based on the Knowledge Processing Unit (KPU) developed by Stillwater Supercomputing, Inc. The Stillwater KPU is the industry's first distributed data flow processor. The IP enables application developers to rapidly integrate high performance parallel computing features in their design. The KPU IP can take advantage of multiple Pico boards to create scalable supercomputing systems optimized for any workload.

Pico Computing will demonstrate the technology in its booth at Supercomputing '12 in Salt Lake City. On display will be a Pico board-based Bioinformatics solution executing a genome assembler, jointly created by Pico Computing, Dr. Manoj Samanta (Principal at Systemix Institute of Redmond) and Dr. Theodore Omtzigt (Principal at Stillwater. Dr. Omtzigt) will be available to answer any of your questions at Supercomputing '12.

In addition to accelerating the design of parallel FPGA-based platforms, the IP also dramatically simplifies the firmware update process for high-performance FPGA systems. The KPU is a software controlled processor, and thus bug fixes and performance improvements are reduced to simple software updates and do not require new bit streams. This is particularly important for the new generation of Xilinx and Altera FPGAs where bit stream generation can take several hours. With the new parallel processing IP, this update process is reduced to seconds.