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November 09, 2007
SGI Claims Largest FPGA Supercomputer
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Unveils RC200 blade to bring FPGAs to Xeon-class SGI system
SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 8 -- SGI today announced it built the world's largest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) supercomputer configuration, then ran a broadly used bioinformatics application more than 900 times faster than the same application would run on a traditional cluster.
SGI's reconfigurable supercomputer featured 70 FPGAs, more than any single system built to date. SGI's FPGA supercomputer accelerated the performance of a complex BLAST-n query by more than 900 times, completing in less than 33 minutes what took a 68-node Opteron-based cluster approximately three weeks to finish(1). The application matched 20 nucleotide base pairs against 600,000 queries.
SGI configured the system using only off-the-shelf components, including its SGI RASC (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) appliance for bioinformatics -- Featuring Mitrion-Accelerated BLAST-n. No hardware or software was modified for the test(2).
Bill Mannel, SGI's director of marketing for servers, compared the SGI RASC system to earlier FPGA systems of similar (but smaller) size. "Previously FPGA supercomputers have been custom-built at very high cost," said Mannel. "The SGI RASC system, in contrast, was built with off-the-shelf components in a short period of time and at less than half the cost of the largest of those custom supercomputers. This represents how SGI is bringing its core capabilities in the high-performance computing industry into the reconfigurable compute space."
Many SGI customers have achieved significant performance improvements with SGI RASC deployments incorporating many fewer than 70 FPGAs. Already in its fourth generation, SGI RASC technology has boosted the productivity of data-intensive applications in industries such as oil and gas exploration, defense and intelligence, bioinformatics, medical imaging, and broadcast media.
FPGAs Go Mainstream with New RC200 Blade
To bring the benefits of FPGAs to more users, SGI today unveiled the new SGI RC200 blade. The new blade is the first to bring SGI RASC technology to SGI Altix XE and SGI Altix ICE clusters and blade servers, both of which are based on Intel Xeon processors. Now organizations with applications running on x86-architecture platforms can incorporate SGI RASC technology in their computing systems. SGI developed the RC200 blade with XtremeData, Inc.
"SGI RASC solutions are designed to bring the benefits of FPGAs to more customers, and the RC200 blade is the next important step in that effort," said Bill Brown, server product marketing manager, SGI. "With on-site integration provided by SGI Professional Services, this new blade can improve the performance of their Xeon-class clusters and blade servers."
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