What is the FHPCA?
The FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA) was established in 2004 and is dedicated to the use of Xilinx FPGAs to deliver new levels of computational performance for real-world industrial applications.
Led by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at The University of Edinburgh, the FHPCA is funded by Scottish Enterprise and builds on the skills of Nallatech Ltd, Alpha Data Ltd, Xilinx Development Corporation, Algotronix and ISLI.
The project, costing £3.6m, hopes to revolutionise the development of applications with massive processing and storage requirements in industries such as drug design, defence, seismology, medical imaging, mobile telecoms and computer modelling.
Until recently, FPGAs have been too small to consider as general purpose numerical computing devices. With the advent of the Virtex 4 and subsequently the Virtex 5 range of devices this is no longer a major issue and the use of such devices for general purpose numerical computing has become a reality.
Results
In March 2007, the Alliance announced the completion of the supercomputer it has been designing and building since the start of the project. Named "Maxwell" after the great Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, the system consists of a 21-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosting 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over RocketIO. This allows codes to be parallelised across the collection of FPGAs and encourages algorithms to be written such that once the data and program are loaded onto the accelerator cards the processing occurs without data being transferred across the PCIX-bus. This approach is delivering previously unattainable performance in a surprisingly small footprint with very low energy costs.
The FHPCA has now successfully ported three numerically intensive applications to Xilinx FPGAs. These applications come from the Oil & Gas, Financial and Medical Imaging sectors.
Working with the FHPCA
The FHPCA is keen to work with new organisations and understand their needs. With such a diverse range of partners, the Alliance bridges the gap between the numerical computing and FPGA communities.
Through EPCC we provide industry users access to the Maxwell supercomputer for prototyping and we also run a Visiting Academic Programme, for further details please see the Technology and Training pages of this website.
Colin Urquhart of Dimensional Imaging (www.di3d.com) a young Scottish company that specialise in 3D digital imaging and model creation said: "Working with the FHPCA has introduced Dimensional Imaging to a new technology which offers the potential to increase significantly the speed of our advanced image processing algorithms. In the future we hope this will enable new products and sales for the company".
Why Scotland?
The Alliance builds on Scotland's world-class reputation in the field of reconfigurable computing. The first commercial reconfigurable computer was created by a Scottish company in the early 1990s and Scottish companies and scientists have since been instrumental in developing and advancing the technology.
Who are the Alliance partners?
Algotronix
Alpha Data
EPCC
Institute for System Level Integration
Nallatech
Xilinx
The project has been facilitated and part funded by the Scottish Enterprise Micro and Optoelectronics team (www.scottish-enterprise.com)
