HPC programmability at SC09, Part 2


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 ...Read More


Convey touts a "both-and" approach for HPC


Remember Convex Computer Corp.? The Richardson, Texas company helped put Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. and gallium-arsenide ASICs on the map in the late 1980s, by using III-V-based gate arrays in a supercomputer. Now, of course, Vitesse is still around (albeit as a CMOS house), but Convex was swallowed by Hewlett-Packard in 1995, GaAs is relegated to a few small tasks, ASICs are waning away, and the supercomputer as commonly defined has given way to the High-Performance Computing (HPC) world of systems that are usually rack-based inhabitants of server data centers.

Some of the Convex founders (Steve Wallach and Bruce Toal, primarily) stayed in Richardson and launched ...Read More


Two make a trend


Remember last summer, when we pointed out the role Stratix FPGAs were playing in a new Xtreme Data platform intended for high-frequency trading? Don’t look now, but Chip Design magazine has just found another example of FPGAs in near-real-time financial analysis. Pico Computing and ET International are claiming a 100x speed-up in Value-at-Risk computations, through parallelizing the algorithms in FPGAs. (While the story does not identify the FPGA, most Pico PCI Express cards are based on Virtex family members.)

In this case, ETi and Pico Computing claim they are lessening risk by using m...Read More


The hazards of a software grab


Why should a swallowing of MontaVista Software by Cavium bother anyone in the FPGA community? Well, does the end result of Intel-Wind River strike fear in your heart? Does anyone remember LVL7 before they went inside Broadcom? How about poor NetPlane Systems, being bounced between Conexant and Motorola Computer Group?

Cavium is a cool company, and I’m sure they’ll put MontaVista’s software to good use in their communication processors. But that is at once the advantage and the problem. ...Read More


               



Video Surveillance


The shift from dedicated DSP processor to FPGAs as an efficient mechanism for parallel signal processing, can be seen in the latest video analytics prototype from Eutecus Inc.  Eutecus, a Xilinx partner who had worked on Texas Instruments Da Vinci architectures in the past, elected to move its Multicore Video analytics Engine, or MVE, to the Spartan-3A DSP 3400A FPGA.  In this video, Xilinx senior product line manager Joe Mallett shows how a mix of software and dedicated hardware in the Spartan allows an HD signal to be processed in real time, utilizing both VGA and QVGA formats. Not only are the DSP blocks running real-time algorithms in the Spartan FPGA important, but the on-chip MicroBlaze RISC architecture runs Eutecus’s InstantVision management software. MVE provides proof that an FPGA with DSP blocks can meet all the real-time constraints of the most modern standalone DSP architectures, and that the use of parallel algorithms allows multiple video signals to be processed simultaneously.

Related Documents
Security Video Analytics on Xilinx Spartan-3A DSP (pdf)
Programmable Embedded Video Analytics Platform (web)
Xilinx Industrial Imaging Solutions Product Brief  (pdf)

 

Take the FPGA Gurus Challenge!

 

  

EDN

    ADC for programmable logic uses one capacitor
    Author: Jef Thoné and Robert Puers, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium' Edited by Martin Rowe and Fran Granville | Date: Nov 12, 2009
    Many electronic devices require user input for setting the application properties. Typical input devices include pushbuttons, potentiometers, and touchscreens. More...

    Avnet releases Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA evaluation and development kits
    Author: By Rick Nelson, Editor-in-Chief | Date: Nov 12, 2009
    The Avnet Electronics Marketing operating group of Avnet Inc has announced the Xilinx Spartan-6 LX16 FPGA evaluation kit and Spartan-6 LX150T FPGA development kit. Both kits support the new FMC (FPGA-mezzanine-card)-expansion standard, which enables the addition of add-on modules and customization More...

    Putting an FPGA in the RRH chain
    Author: Loring Wirbel | Date: Oct 26, 2009
    Analyst Loring Wirbel covers programmable logic from an application perspective, providing a sneak peek at the vertical applications that help drive FPGA complexity, performance, and density. The blog will feature videos allowing engineers to spotlight their latest designs, along with news of More...




©1997-2009 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Use of this Web site is subject to its Terms of Use | Privacy Policy

Please visit these other Reed Business sites