GOVERNMENT

Cray Inc. today announced that Cray XD1 supercomputers will support the latest generation of Xilinx; Virtex-4 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), including the Virtex-4 LX and SX platform. The Cray XD1 system is designed to employ the Xilinx FPGAs as advanced co-processors that let users accelerate high-performance computing (HPC) applications involving compute-intensive operations, such as digital signal processing or searching and sorting routines. The Cray XD1 supercomputer is one of the first platforms to deliver true reconfigurable computing. The system overcomes communications delays by integrating Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs at the operating system level and linking them to AMD Opteron™ processors through a high-bandwidth, low-latency interconnect. The Virtex-4 FPGA devices provide up to three times the number of gates, significantly increasing processing power. The Virtex-4 LX platform is ideal for logic-intensive applications such as encryption and search and sort, while the Virtex-4 SX family provides built in digital signal processing (DSP) capabilities ideal for the extremely large amounts of data required for audio and image manipulation. "As new generations of Xilinx devices become available, the Cray XD1 supercomputer is ready to make the most of these innovations with an architecture that gives the FPGAs full access to the system's RapidArray interconnect and processor memory," said Amar Shan, Cray XD1 product manager. "We believe reconfigurable computing based on FPGA technology will continue to prove invaluable for researchers and engineers who want to accelerate HPC applications. Companies like Celoxica and others have developed software tools that enable users to take even greater advantage of the Cray XD1 system's FPGA capabilities." "Cray engineers have developed the world's fastest supercomputers by using our latest FPGA technology in an innovative way to accelerate their main CPUs," said Chuck Tralka, director of marketing for the Advanced Products Division at Xilinx. "The latest generation of Virtex-4 devices provide the high-performance features required to implement such forward-thinking technology." "At Sandia National Laboratories, a central part of our reconfigurable computing research effort involves work with the FPGA-equipped Cray XD1 supercomputer," said Craig Ulmer of Sandia National Laboratory's Visualization & Scientific Computing group. "The Cray XD1 system's architecture provides unique opportunities for accelerating scientific applications using FPGA co-processors. We are looking forward to being able to leverage the latest generation of Xilinx FPGAs in order to improve our reconfigurable computing capabilities."