The FHPCA organised and participated in several events, including workshops, seminars and community briefings, some of which were aimed at the electronics design community.
February 27th 2008
The FHPCA exhibited at the
Scottish Technology Showcase at the SECC, Glasgow
November 10-16th 2007
The FHPCA exhibited at SC07
which was held at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center in Reno, Nevada, USA.
October 31st 2007
The FHPCA hosted a Technology Leaders Lunch at the Apex Dundee City Quay, Dundee from 12:30 to 14:00.
This was an excellent opportunity to find out more about FPGA technology and how to gain commercial advantage from its use.
Flyer for the event in PDF format
The FHPCA will be holding an Energy Leaders Technology Lunch at The Marcliffe at Pitfodels, Aberdeen from 12:30 to 14:00
This was an opportunity to find out more about FPGA technology and how to gain commercial advantage from its use. Maxwell, the FHPCA Supercomputer, is a key resource for Scottish business which can exploit its potential through engagement with EPCC and other members of the FHPCA. This event was focused on the business benefits of FPGAs for the energy sector and featured a case study from OHM Surveys plc
Flyer for the event in PDF format
The FHPCA participated in a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) Session titled "Programmability of FPGA for Application Developers" at ISC'07.
For classes of applications in which computational kernels are dominated by either integer arithmetic or for those which can be efficiently transformed to use fixed point arithmetic, speedups of two orders of magnitude can be achieved by using FPGA devices. However, to make FPGAs accessible to HPC and enterprise application programmers, methodologies for programming them must be close to those of traditional software development.
The major topic of the BoF was a discussion of suitable approaches to programming FPGAs from the "traditional" application developer perspective. The BoF started with short presentations from OpenFPGA and FHPCA to provide an update of relevant developments. These presentations were followed by an open discussion.
May 29th 2007
The FHPCA Technology Leaders Lunch was held at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh from 12:30pm to 2:00pm.
Please take a look at the following PDF for further information
November 11-17th 2006
FHPCA took part at SC06 - High performance computing conference which
was held in Tampa Bay, Florida, USA from the 11-17 November 2006. We were found at Booth 906.
Also at SC06, the FHPCA organised a BOF "Programming FPGAs: "Challenges and Successes". This event took place in Ballroom A from 12:15pm - 1:15pm on the 15th November 2006.
Abstract:
The use of FPGAs for general-purpose supercomputing is being investigated by several projects worldwide.
The FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance
(FHPCA) is developing HPC solutions for real-world applications using FPGAs.
It has built a 64-FPGA supercomputer located in Scotland.
The widespread take-up of FPGAs will only occur when they are more easily programmed. Ease of programming is the major challenge faced by this technology. This BoF will focus on reporting the experience gained in porting three real-world industrial applications to the FHPCA system and discussing the developments needed to overcome the programmability barrier.
Panellists will come from the FHPCA and other organisations active in this area. There will be a strong emphasis on moderated discussion.
The FHPCA involves EPCC, Alpha Data Ltd, Nallatech Ltd, Xilinx Corporation, Algotronix Ltd, ISLI and Scottish Enterprise.
June 27th 2006
Scottish Enterprise and the FHPCA held a Business Briefing Lunchtime Seminar on Tuesday 27th June 2006 at the
Caledonian Hilton in Edinburgh. The event was free with a buffet lunch and was complemented by a series of
short talks on the work on the FHPCA.
For further information, please call Barry Collard on 0131 651 7194 or email info@fhpca.org
