Feb. 21 — Xcelerit, the leading providers of acceleration solutions for Quantitative Finance, engineering and research, have added yet another new architecture to its expanding portfolio of processor support. The new Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU accelerator delivers 5 teraflops of double precision arithmetic – an unprecedented level of computing power that will enable new applications in machine learning, quant finance and to the supercomputing community in general. Accessing this awesome power normally requires specialist expert programming to handle the data transfers, threads and synchronisation, memory access, and register usage. The Xcelerit SDK has been making it easier for programmers to access this power over a succession of GPU architectures as well as more mainstream systems like many-core CPUs. Hicham Lahlou, Xcelerit’s CEO, is enthusiastic about the P100 – “Our customers always want the latest, fastest hardware and for those that have used Xcelerit since the beginning, they can now painlessly move their code from CPU to the P100 GPU and back with no changes required.”
The Xcelerit SDK works by allowing users to quickly identify the compute intensive parts of their C++ code and augment them with some simple programming model to reveal the hidden potential for parallelism. Once this is done, the SDK automatically takes care of mapping the code to any of the supported architectures and looks after scheduling the tasks to take maximum advantage of the underlying hardware. “The SDK is really quite adaptable,” says Lahlou, “we have been able to tailor it to very many processor architectures, instruction sets, memory configurations and inter-connects to squeeze every drop of performance out of the underlying hardware.” Lahlou feels that this capability may become even more essential over the coming years. “We are seeing a healthy diversity in processor designs coming from manufacturers such as Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm and others – making performance code work super-efficiently across all of those platforms will keep us on our toes over the coming 12-18 months,” he said.
About Xcelerit
Xcelerit is a leading provider of acceleration solutions for Quantitative Finance, engineering, and research. Our portfolio of solutions addresses a range of acceleration challenges from algorithmic optimisations to software acceleration.
Xcelerit has received recognition as a finalist in the Red Herring Europe Top 100 award, the Red Herring Top 100 Global award, and a two-time winner of HPCwire’s “Best use of High Performance Computing in Financial Services” award. Our satisfied customers include the leading firms in investment banking, asset management, and insurance. For more information, please visit www.xcelerit.com.
Source: Xcelerit