SGI Offers Accelerator For Data-Intensive Apps

SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) has introduced a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology that the company claims is capable of substantially increasing computing application performance.

The FPGA-based hardware is based on SGI's reconfigurable application-specific computing (RASC) technology. According to SGI (Mountain View, Calif.), it offers unmatched performance, scalability and bandwidth for data-intensive applications.

"SGI's RASC technology offers [high-performance computing] users a cost-effective way to achieve substantial application performance gains," said Dave Parry, senior vice president and general manager of SGI's Server and Platform Group, in a statement.

SGI said the RASC technology is specifically designed to overcome challenges associated with a lack of high-level programming expertise that has prevented FPGA-based acceleration from broadly penetrating the high-performance computing market. The technology is designed to ease the implementation of FPGA technology, SGI said, making application performance enhancements available to more users.

The RASC solution includes an FPGA-aware version of the Gnu Debugger, an abstraction layer that enables serial or parallel FPGA scaling, a RASC API and core services library that provides tools to develop reconfigurable computing elements in a multi-user/multi-processing environment and SGI's technology contributions to the OpenFPGA industry working group.The technology is available today as an add-in module that operates with SGI's Intel Itanium 2 processor-based servers and visualization systems.