BIOS: Technology Means Business

Silicon Graphics (SGI) has unveiled a ‘groundbreaking’ solution that packs the power of dozens of supercomputer nodes into a single blade by leveraging the inherent parallelism of the industry’s most powerful Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology.

The RASC RC100 computation blade, built with dual Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGAs, can accelerate the performance of many HPC applications by orders of magnitude over conventional systems at a far lower cost and much smaller footprint, says SGI.

Based on SGI’s RASC (Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing) technology, the new RC100 blade is designed for customers whose applications spend most of their time working on a set of specific routines or algorithms. By accelerating those routines, RASC technology can dramatically improve the performance of the overall application.

Designed for use with SGI’s Altix servers, the RASC RC100 blade can be programmed at your site to accelerate mission-critical, high-performance computing (HPC) applications in oil and gas exploration, defence and intelligence, bioinformatics, medical imaging, and broadcast media.

To deliver orders-of-magnitude performance improvements for customers in a wide range of markets, the RC100 blade leverages the SGI Altix system’s acclaimed high-bandwidth and shared-memory architecture to create a unique, cost-efficient solution that overcomes the limitations of other FPGA-based products.

For instance, the 6.4GB/s NUMAlink 4 interconnect accelerates memory access, offering more than three times the performance of with PCI and PCI-X bus ports and well outpacing the interconnect technologies supported by companies such as Cray, claims SGI.

A RASC solution stack incorporates fully integrated third-party high-level language (HLL) development tools, including Handel-C and DK Design Suite from Celoxica, and Mitrion-C from Mitrionics. Along with third-party libraries and tools, SGI provides core services, including a RASC aware version of Gnu Debugger and a RASC API, to ease the process for users who are incorporating RASC RC100 blades as a seamless part of their SGI Altix servers.

SGI RASC technology is available today in two base: dual Xilinx Virtex 4 LX200 FPGAs, 80MB QDR SRAM (with up to 20GB DDR2 SDRAM optional starting in June) and dual NUMAlink 4 ports. The RC100 blade is plug-and-play installable on Altix 4000 servers. For non-blade architecture systems, a chassis with two blade slots is available that allows you to install RC100 blades on SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 and Altix 350 servers.

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