Scottish supercomputer wins medal at the British Computer Society IT Awards
A unique supercomputer called ‘Maxwell’ – built in Scotland by the FHPCA with the support of Scottish Enterprise – has been recognised at this year’s prestigious British Computer Society IT Industry Awards in London. Nominated in two categories, the FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance) came home with a medal having been placed runner-up for the much coveted prize of the BT Flagship Award for Innovation.
The FHPCA was established in 2004 to promote the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an alternative to microprocessors. With traditional microprocessor-based solutions hitting performance limits, there is a growing need for new technologies that address the need for ever greater processing capability without demanding large amounts of space and power.
Maxwell uses FPGAs and requires much less space and cooling than a conventional microprocessor system. It is also over 100 times more energy-efficient and up to 300 times faster. Several Scottish companies have been using Maxwell since its launch in March this year. Impressive results have already been achieved in the oil & gas and medical imaging sectors.
One of the first companies to use the supercomputer, Aberdeen-based Offshore Hydrocarbon Mapping plc (OHM), found that its application ran significantly faster on Maxwell. OHM is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services to the offshore oil industry.
Dr Lucy MacGregor, Chief Scientific Officer of OHM, said: "Improving the performance of our data processing and visualisation services is key to our continued success and we are very excited about the code speed-ups we’ve achieved with Maxwell."
Of course, many other sectors of industry could benefit too, particularly the financial sector. In order to demonstrate the power of FPGAs and the Maxwell system when handling Monte Carlo calculations for the investment banking sector, the Alliance decided to implement the Black-Scholes algorithm, which is commonly used to calculate future stock prices. Spectacular results were obtained. In particular the algorithm ran 320 times faster per FPGA on Maxwell compared to the equivalent algorithm running on the host PC. This demonstration of the Black-Scholes algorithm has shown the potential benefits of FPGAs to the financial sector and the Alliance is currently pursuing opportunities with several leading investment banks, some of whom have been conducting their own experiments with FPGAs.
Dr Mark Parsons, Commercial Director of EPCC said: "Maxwell has been created for businesses so that they can easily investigate FPGAs. We’ve already seen it give companies a competitive advantage. We now want more businesses to come and test their codes on Maxwell to see whether it will be useful for them too."
Maxwell was built by the FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance). The Alliance is led by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and comprises Alpha Data, Nallatech, Xilinx, Algotronix, Scottish Enterprise and the iSLI. The BCS IT Industry Awards are the leading hallmark of success among practitioners in the IT industry today.
David Clark, BCS Chief Executive, said: "This year’s awards are a fitting culmination to our 50th anniversary year which has been exceptional. Technology has enabled unparalleled improvements in productivity and business efficiency over the last 50 years and today IT drives business. These winners have embraced this concept and proven their excellence in innovation and professionalism; they exemplify the importance and value that technology brings to business, society and the economy."
The winners were announced on Thursday 6th December.
Contact:
Ms Tracy Peet
Marketing & Publicity Coordinator
EPCC
Tel - 0131 650 5030
Email – t.peet@epcc.ed.ac.uk
NOTES
1. Maxwell system
Named after James Clerk Maxwell, the great Scottish physicist and creator of the first colour photograph, Maxwell has achieved impressive
results in all three demonstrator projects:
- Financial option pricing has been accelerated by over 300 times per node, taking less than a minute to do what used to take over four hours;
- Three-dimensional video frames can be processed at over 8 frames per second, where previously each frame took nearly 15 seconds to analyse;
- Oil and gas simulations run over 5 times faster per node than a cluster of 3 GHz Xeon processors.
Technical specification:
The system consists of a 32-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosting 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over high-speed RocketIO. Maxwell
differs from many FPGA-based systems in that the FPGAs are 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 again across the PCI-X bus.
This approach is delivering previously unattainable performance in a surprisingly small footprint with very low energy costs.
2. FPGAs
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are programmable semiconductor devices that are based around a matrix of configurable logic blocks
connected via programmable interconnects. As opposed to normal microprocessors, where the design of the device is fixed by the manufacturer,
FPGAs can be programmed to compute the exact algorithm required by a given application. This makes them very powerful and versatile.
3. FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA): www.fhpca.org
FHPCA bridges the gap between the numerical computing and FPGA communities. Established during 2004, it is dedicated to the use
of Xilinx FPGAs to deliver new levels of computational performance for real-world industrial applications. FHPCA is led by EPCC, funded by
Scottish Enterprise and builds on the skills of Nallatech Ltd, Alpha Data Ltd, Xilinx Development Corporation, Algotronix Ltd and ISLI.
4. Alpha Data: www.alpha-data.com
Established in 1993, Alpha Data is at the forefront of the new wave of reconfigurable computing and a world leader in embedded FPGA
platforms. Alpha Data is headquartered in the UK with a sales office in California.
5. EPCC: www.epcc.ed.ac.uk
Founded in 1990, EPCC’s mission is to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing solutions throughout academia, industry and commerce.
Today EPCC is the leading computational science technology transfer centre in Europe. EPCC leads the FHPCA and provides academics and industrial
users with access to the Maxwell system which is housed at the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF).
6. Nallatech: www.nallatech.com
Founded in 1993, Nallatech is the world's leading supplier of high-performance COTS FPGA Solutions. Nallatech designs and manufactures high-performance
FPGA embedded products, in form factors such as PCI, VME, cPCI, PCI-X and PCI-104. Customers benefit from lower costs, reduction in size,
weight and power and improved performance. Headquartered in Glasgow, Scotland, its wholly-owned subsidiary Nallatech Inc. has U.S. group
offices in Baltimore and regional offices in San Jose, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Boston. Nallatech has six operating locations worldwide and
international partner sales offices in seven countries.
7. iSLI: www.sli-institute.ac.uk
Founded in 1998, iSLI (the Institute for System Level Integration) provides postgraduate education, professional training and research in
system level integration incorporating cross over technologies such as hardware, embedded software, MNT/MEMS. A collaboration of the computing
science, informatics and electronic engineering departments of the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Heriot-Watt and Strathclyde, and
Scottish Enterprise, the Institute is the first centre of excellence in system level integration to be established worldwide. Its aim is
to support the development of electronics systems design worldwide and to encourage the exploration of new technologies through research.
8. Scottish Enterprise: www.scottishenterprise.com
Scottish Enterprise is the main economic development agency for Scotland covering 93% of the population from Grampian to the Borders.
The Scottish Enterprise Network consists of Scottish Enterprise and 12 Local Enterprise Companies. Working in partnership with the
private and public sectors the Network aims to build more and better businesses, to develop the skills and knowledge of Scottish people,
and to encourage innovation to make Scottish business internationally competitive.
9. British Computer Society: www.bcs.org
Established in 1957, the British Computer Society (BCS) is the leading body for those working in IT and has a worldwide membership of over
60,000 members in 100 countries. BCS was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1984. Its objectives are to promote the study and practice of
computing and to advance knowledge of and education in IT for the benefit of the public. BCS is also a registered charity. The winners of
The IT Industry Awards 2007 will be announced at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London on 6th December 2007.
10. OHM: www.ohmsurveys.com
Offshore Hyrdocarbon Mapping (OHM) is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services, including
surveying, data processing, and data interpretation services to the offshore oil industry. CSEMI has been used for over 20 years by
researchers to examine hydrothermal and volcanic systems on mid-ocean ridges. With offices in Aberdeen, Scotland and Houston,
Texas, they serve clients from around the globe in offshore locations ranging from shallow to ultra deep water. OHM’s full
service CSEMI offering spans a broad range disciplines.
