CSCS Top Right Frontpage
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags
Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Blog: From the Editor

From the Editor | Main Blog Index

September 16, 2010

Supercomputer-on-a-Chip Delivers Synthetic Vision

Real-time object recognition is a pretty mundane task for us humans, but for computers it requires enormous amounts of processing power, necessitating a whole room full of servers. And that's too bad, since some of the most useful applications for object recognition would be naturally found on mobile and hand-held platforms, where computational performance and power tend to be rather limited.

But a small group of researchers have come up with what looks like an enticing solution. Out of Yale University comes a report  that researchers there have developed a "supercomputer" able to do real-time object recognition. The system, called NueFlow, is implemented as neural network mapped onto an FGPA, and can easily fit on the top of a desk, in a car, and perhaps eventually even in a cell phone. The work was presented on September 15 at the High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) workshop in Boston, Mass.

The head researcher on the project, Eugenio Culurciello of Yale's School of Engineering & Applied Science, said NueFlow works by simulating the mammalian visual system, mimicking the biological neural network that is hardwired into our brains.  The system built by Culurciello and his colleagues uses vision algorthims, based on convolutional  neural networks (ConvNets), mapped onto a Xilinx Virtex FPGA.  The latest prototype uses a 200 MHz Virtex 6 processor.

A more detailed description of the NueFlow system architecture is found here, where it describes the rationale for the FPGA implementation.

.Why is custom hardware so important? Because it can significantly speed up the execution of ConvNets and allow larger networks to come into life, with more object discrimination capabilities, larger invariance to size and position, and wider input images and filter banks.

Calling this a supercomputer is a bit over the top, inasmuch as the system delivers a modest 100 gigaops or so of compute. The magic here appears to be in mapping the vision algorithms onto FPGA hardware and getting the attendent performance boost. According to the researchers, the implementation is 60 times faster than that of an Intel i7 CPU running the equivalent software and even 2 times faster than that of a high-end (512-core) NVIDIA GPU. Power-wise the comparison is even more favorable to the NueFlow implementation since the power draw was just 7 watts for the FPGA, versus 35 watts for the CPU and 300 watts for the GPU.

"The complete system is going to be no bigger than a wallet, so it could easily be embedded in cars and other places," said Culurciello in the Yale press announcement.

In fact, one application the researchers are focusing on is autonomous car navigation, where real-time object recognition is something you literally can't live without. This would certainly shake up our whole approach to automotive transportation. (For example, what would a car insurance policy look like?) Speaking of which, I'm guessing such a system would be required to perform even better than a human. Nobody would put up with a computer-driven car that worked 99 percent of the time and ran over people and property the other 1 percent of the time.

Beyond the car driving scenario, synthetic vision has numerous other applications, such as robot navigation into dangerous or difficult-to-reach locations, combat operations where soldiers could get a 360-degree view of their surroundings, and in assisted living situations to provide a 24/7 monitoring.

Posted by Michael Feldman - September 16, 2010 @ 3:07 PM, Pacific Daylight Time

Sponsored Links

Transforming computational research and engineering
Accelerate your computational research and engineering applications with Exxact’s Tesla K20 GPU workstations and servers, maximized for supercomputing professionals.

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic


Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type


Subscribe to All Content

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman

Michael Feldman is the editor of HPCwire.

More Michael Feldman

Asetek

Recent Comments

No Recent Blog Comments

Feature Articles

My Supercomputer is Bigger Than Yours!

Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...

Alternatives Emerge as Linpack Loses Ground

Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...

Intel Snaps New Grips to HPC Hook

Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...

Short Takes

Supercomputers: Not Always the Best for Big Data

Jun 18, 2013 | The world's largest supercomputers, like Tianhe-2, are great at traditional, compute-intensive HPC workloads, such as simulating atomic decay or modeling tornados. But data-intensive applications--such as mining big data sets for connections--is a different sort of workload, and runs best on a different sort of computer.
Read more...

Gordon Flashes Its Versatility in HPC Workloads

Jun 18, 2013 | Researchers are finding innovative uses for Gordon, the 285 teraflop supercomputer housed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) that has a unique Flash-based storage system. Since going online, researchers have put the incredibly fast I/O to use on a wide variety of workloads, ranging from chemistry to political science.
Read more...

Supercomputers: Still the King of the HPC Hill

Jun 17, 2013 | The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
Read more...

TACC Longhorn Takes On Natural Language Processing

Jun 14, 2013 | For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
Read more...

Titan Didn't Redo LINPACK for June Top 500 List

Jun 13, 2013 | Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

HPCwire Live! Atlanta's Big Data Kick Off Week Meets HPC

Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?

Webinar: Mellanox Virtual Modular Switch, the Most Efficient 40GbE Aggregation Switch Solution

Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.

Blogs by Topics

Blogs by Author

HPC Blogroll


Featured Events






  • November 17, 2013 - November 22, 2013
    SC'13
    Denver, CO
    United States


HPCwire Events
Home | News | Features | Blogs | HPC Markets | Whitepapers | Multimedia | Events | Job Bank | Academia & Research | Financial Services | Government | Life Sciences | Manufacturing | Oil & Gas | Retail | Applications | Developer Tools | Interconnects | Middleware | Networks | Processors | Storage | Systems | Visualization | Subscribe | About HPCwire | Contact Us | Site Map | Editorial Calendar | Reprints
HPCwire
Tabor Communications | Tabor Publications & Events
Tabor Communications