Convey Computer Introduces Image Resizer Accelerator

July 15, 2014

RICHARDSON, Tex., July 15 — Convey Computer, the leader in hybrid-core computing, today announced the Accelerated Image Resizer, a technology that utilizes an FPGA (field programmable gate array)-based PCI Express card to resize images up to seventy times faster than a conventional server. Convey’s drop-in acceleration can be used to offload image resizing from existing web servers, a dedicated resizing tier, or a commercial Content Delivery Network (CDN). Using the technology, overall responsiveness of servers is significantly improved while operating costs are dramatically reduced.

Image resizing is an important component of content delivery for most web sites, especially those involved in social media, photo sharing, and online shopping. These sites often handle hundreds of images per session–-accepting images from a variety of sources such as cameras, smartphones, or digital content creation applications-–then delivering them in multiple resolutions to accommodate different layouts.

Resizing images to meet these requirements is computationally expensive and can represent a significant load on a server infrastructure. For instance, a 12 megapixel image from a modern mobile device can take as much as 1.5 seconds of computer processing time to rescale to a smaller size. When multiplied by dozens of images per page and many pages per second, image resizing consumes a substantial amount of computing horsepower to deliver scaled images.

Convey’s Accelerated Image Resizer scales JPEG images using an FPGA-based coprocessor, offloading the host processors to deliver considerably higher throughput. The implementation collects resize requests and dispatches them to the coprocessor where the hardware decodes, resizes, and re-encodes the images. These operations are highly parallelizable, resulting in much higher throughput compared to a conventional server.

“FPGA technology is becoming more and more popular as an effective way to accelerate certain applications, as witnessed by recent news from Intel and Microsoft,” explained Bruce Toal, CEO of Convey. “At Convey, we’re leading the industry in exploiting the parallelism available from FPGAs. Our image resizing application is just the latest example of how our easy to implement and use hybrid-core technology helps customers achieve dramatically higher throughput, reduce response time, and save money on infrastructure costs.”

In November of last year, Convey announced that they would OEM Dell servers to accelerate data intensive applications for data centers. The Convey Accelerated Image Resizer technology is a direct result of that effort.

“Dell pioneered the hyperscale industry’s inception about seven years ago with innovations that make customers’ data centers more efficient in ways that have a direct correlation to savings in operating expenses,” said Robert Hormuth, Dell Executive Director, Enterprise Platform Architecture & Technology. “By pairing Convey FPGA technology with Dell servers, we allow our hyperscale customers to accelerate the applications that matter to them, which can help reduce capex, space or power costs. In the case of this image resizing application, customers can achieve space savings of nearly 90% compared to using conventional servers.”

The hardware resizing logic in the Convey Image Resizer delivers an average of forty-eight times the performance of a software implementation on a conventional processor. Because a single hybrid-core server achieves the performance on average of forty-eight commodity servers, customers can see a dramatic reduction in capital and operational costs. Savings include facilities (power, heat dissipation, floor space) and administrative overhead.

Convey’s Accelerated Image Resizer may be deployed as a turnkey product; or the Convey application accelerator PCIe card and application may be custom integrated by the user. The accelerator can be reconfigured “on the fly” by simply loading a different application, allowing multiple applications to be hosted on the same hardware. Convey provides a development kit for customers to develop their own applications, extending the system to address different needs.

Convey delivers accelerated hybrid-core solutions to customers who need powerful platforms to reduce time-to-solution, lower operating costs, and shrink data center footprints. This latest image resizing technology builds on the company’s Wolverine® family of coprocessors, a powerful line of application accelerators that provide application-specific hardware acceleration for key algorithms. Announced in November of 2013, Wolverine’s PCI Express form factor is ideal for accelerating applications in life sciences, big data, security, and other industries involved in high-performance computing (HPC).

About Convey Computer Corporation

Convey breaks power, performance and programmability barriers with the world’s first hybrid-core computer—a system that marries the low cost and simple programming model of a commodity system with the performance of a customized hardware architecture. Using the Convey hybrid-core systems, customers worldwide in industries such as life sciences, research, big data, and the government/military are enjoying order of magnitude performance increases.

Source: Convey Computer Corporation

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire