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Editor's Note: See also Part 1 of our four-part mini-series on FPGA-Based Hardware Acceleration of C/C++ Based Applications.
Supercomputer manufacturer Cray Inc. is to include FPGA-based Reconfigurable Processor Units (RPUs) from DRC Computer Corporation in an optional reconfigurable computing blade in its newly launched hybrid supercomputer, the Cray XT5h system. DRC's RPU is claimed to deliver dramatic performance advantages for High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications.
Incorporating multiple processing technologies on a common infrastructure, the Cray XT5h system – part of the new Cray XT5 family of supercomputers – is said to be the industry's first integrated hybrid supercomputer.
The DRC RPU features the largest FPGA currently on the market, the Virtex-4 LX200 device from Xilinx, Inc. The DRC RPU110-L200 model enables 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 AMD 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.
For more information please visit www.drccomputer.com and/or www.cray.com.
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