INDUSTRY

PLDA today announced that Atsushi Kawai, a professor with the Saitama Institute of Technology, and Toshiyuki Fukushige, a scientist with the K&F Computing Research Co., are finalists for the Gordon Bell price / performance prize, which judges genuine scientific applications based on a performance ratio measured in sustained flops per dollar of acquisition cost. Professors Kawai and Fukushige built two low-cost systems based on PLDA products designed to execute astrophysical N-body simulation, one of the most widely used techniques for exploring the formation and evolution of astronomical objects. Their article is published with the Super Computing International Conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis (its Web site). "We chose PLDA because their products deliver the best performance / price value," explains professor Kawai. "Our system performs a cosmological N-body simulation with 2.1 million particles with a sustained performance of 22.59 Gflops averaged over 2.95 hours. The total price of our system is $2,363, which yields a price per performance ratio of $105 / Gflops." The first of the two systems consists of PLDA's PCIe XpressLite GX design kit, PLDA's PCIe XpressLite IP controller, and a host PC. The second system incorporates PLDA's PCI-X IP controller. Both systems yield similar results. The XpressLite GX Design Kit, based on the Altera Stratix GX FPGA, is a low-cost PCI-SIG compliant solution designed for x4 Endpoint applications. The board is delivered with the PCI-SIG compliant XpressLite IP Controller free of charge. Other deliverables include a PCI Express Testbench, reference design, Software Development Kit (SDK), and technical support provided directly by the IP design team. The professors' article, titled $105/GFLOP Astrophysical N-Body Simulation with a Reconfigurable Add-in Card and a Hierarchical Tree Algorithm, is available here its Web site.