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
