FPGA Gurus

FPGAs are more commonplace in Portland this week than I thought. The last FPGA Gurus post described Convey Computer’s presence at the SC09 conference in Portland, and how supercomputers might see greater competition from configurable board-level products as they migrate down from MIMD monster size to simple rack-mounted hybrid systems.

Turns out another exhibitor at the high-performance computing show is Nallatech, which is showing off the latest two members of its family of COTS PCI Express boards, the newest using the Xilinx Virtex-5. Notice those key qualifiers – COTS. PCIe. Add-in board. Nallatech recognizes that the easiest way to get into an existing server farm may be to offer reprogrammable components for a blade-based platform. Like Pico Computing, who we mentioned last week, Nallatech does not pre-define the software for a vertical market, but works with others to characterize the FPGAs.

I am not suggesting the role of the FPGA in a pre-packaged supercomputer will be minimal, nor am I suggesting Convey has a narrow market window. But just as the dedicated supercomputer of the 1990s was replaced by a user-configurable cluster of servers and storage controllers, the rack-mounted pre-defined supercomputer could be displaced by systems that the end user can define at the level of board, FPGA, core processor, and software. There will likely be room for both approaches, but modularity has defined the data center for the last two decades, and the trend will probably accelerate rather than reverse.