Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 10/24/05 issue

Reconfigurable chips could accelerate HPC

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

New systems from Cray, SGI offer performance boost but require expertise

At first glance, the new Cray XD1 that showed up on the loading dock of the Naval Research Laboratory last summer looked like a regular supercomputer. But buried inside the 2.5-TFLOP machine was something genuinely new—microchips with seemingly magical powers to improve performance.

The magical chips are called field-programmable gate arrays and—at least for certain mathematically intensive processes—promise to boost performance fortyfold or more. What’s more, the chips pave the way for reconfigurable computing, a process that allows the owner to modify the chip to meet the specific needs of an application. Although FPGAs require an investment in program modification, vendors say, the payoff could be enormous.

Two of the top supercomputing companies recently introduced FPGA-based components that users can add on to their supercomputers. In September, Silicon Graphics Inc. introduced its Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing (RASC) server, an add-on unit that an administrator can plug into an SGI system to boost performance. The company is following the lead of Cray Inc. of Seattle, which made FPGA an option for the mid-range XD1 supercomputers it introduced a year ago.

According to observers, the entrance of these supercomputer heavyweights might finally bring the powers of FPGA computing to a wider audience. FPGAs have long been embedded in electronic appliances, such as automobile subsystems that give dashboards their smarts. But for general computing, FPGAs have only been offered on plug-in cards, or through dedicated systems offered by smaller companies such as SRC Computers Inc. of Colorado Springs, Colo.

The government has been an early adopter of FPGAs in supercomputing. SGI’s product was actually spawned by government work, said Bill Mannel, director of marketing for SGI’s server and platform group. A defense agency had asked the company to outfit an SGI Altix system with customized FPGA chips. One of the chips could do the work of 144 regular processors.

More news on related topics: Hardware, Enterprise Architecture, IT Infrastructure



GCN Popup