Let’s begin – Why don’t you provide some background on XCT, who you are and what it is you set out to accomplish?
XCT was founded by HPC Industry veterans whose primary mission is to further the adoption of Innovative Technologies that will advance the adoption of GPU’s, FPGA’s and SSD’s amongst other truly transformational technologies as they relate to accelerating the pace of discovery in the demanding HPC environment.
We believe these technologies are leading to a further democratization of HPC by making these tools available and accessible to broader constituencies of researchers across a wide spectrum of disciplines and verticals. We are fortunate to be witnessing this revolution in HPC and, as the wide scale propagation of these technologies increases, we will see a flowering of creativity that was simply unimaginable just a few short years ago.
Specifically, what products do you currently have or offer that will aide in fulfilling that mission?
First off, we view our innovative product offering as the vehicle for driving to the fulfillment and realization of our mission and vision.
The core platform is encompassed in our “BriX” family of PCIe expansion chassis. Our BriX chassis offer a number of configuration and device options that provide the right balance of devices for deployment in solving a specific problem set. The advantage of the BriX architecture is that we can mix and match devices to achieve a problem specific, purpose built, and application specific solution
For example, our a-BriX can be outfitted with the full range of NVIDIA Tesla GPU’s, from 10 Series to the full line of Fermi 2050 and 2070. Our r-BriX can likewise be configured with a variety of FGPA devices and our v-BriX, can be configured with the full complement of Quadro class GPU’s for visualization applications. Our forthcoming s-BriX will offer configurations with industry leading SSD cards where extremely high data transfer speeds are a must.
What are the key differentiators of your BriX offering vis-a-vis the competition such as the NVIDIA “S” class GPU servers?
There are three key areas where XCT differentiates from what is currently available in the market, namely Flexibility, Serviceability and Upgradability. Flexibility, as we’ve previously stated, gives us the ability to mix and match devices within a single chassis resulting in a truly purpose-built solution fined tuned to the target application set. Serviceability, our BriX chassis are field serviceable and are delivered with a 3 year onsite service contract which eliminates the need for an entire chassis replacement, thereby increasing uptime and availability. Upgradability allows for a level of investment protection in the rapidly evolving accelerator market not currently available from competing vendors.
What product enhancements do you foresee in the near future for XCT’s roadmap?
XCT is in the process of finalizing a new, higher density, more modular design capable of supporting 8 and 16 devices in a new “hot swappable” canister design allowing for device swapping “on the fly”. Most importantly, our next generation chassis will be based on PCIe, Gen 3 which will provide for substantially higher throughput and will be ready for the next generation of PCIe devices such as those from NVIDIA and thus continuing our emphasis on investment protection and future proofing not found in competitive products. These new products and enhancements are expected to ship in the second quarter of this year. Dynamic reassignment of device resources is another significant enhancement we’ll be talking about in more detail in the near future.
What other products do you offer outside the BriX product platforms, if any?
We are currently in the process of shipping our latest offering, our 8 Fermi GPU “Reality Engine” platform purpose built to provide the ideal platform for NVIDIA’s Reality Server. The Reality Engine is available as a 4u Data Center solution or as well as the industries densest and quietest GPU workstation operating with a full 8 Fermi GPU’s at under 45 db. We will also be bringing the industries highest density heterogeneous blade infrastructure to market later in the calendar quarter!
What validation have you received from your partners for your innovative approach?
Sure here you go….
“As our newest Tesla Preferred Partner, XCT brings a wealth of experience in the HPC market and a product line up that delivers a great deal of flexibility for its customers,” said Andy Keane, General Manager, Tesla business at NVIDIA. “Equipped with our newly data center certified Tesla C--class processors, XCT’s solutions address the rapidly expanding community of developers leveraging the GPU for HPC and scientific computing.”
“XCT and PNY are partnering to bring together the advantages of the new Fermi based NVIDIA Quadro multi GPU capabilities within the XCT family of compute solutions. Featuring CUDA, OpenGL 4.1 hardware acceleration, ECC and fast double precision, these new high performance compute solutions are ideal for XCT clients”
— Jeff Medeiros, Director of Marketing and Business Development, PNY Technologies.
“XCT brings a seasoned team of HPC experts who have recognized the persistent role that co-processors such as GPU’s and FPGA’s are playing and will continue to play in the HPC market.” said Dr. Vincent Natoli, President of Stone Ridge Technology. “The r-BriX line of products uses our latest FPGA hardware and will have a dramatic impact on performance for applications in Bioinformatics, Financial feed processing and National Intelligence.
For additional information about XCT, please visit www.xtremecompute.com or contact them at [email protected].