University project selects Altera, Impulse for reconfigurable computer

SAN FRANCISCO—The National Science Foundation Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHEC) is developing what it considers the most power reconfigurable computing machine ever field for research, linking 96 high-end Stratix III FPGAs from Altera Corp. with 576 GB of memory and 20 Gb/s InfiniBand.

The system, dubbed Novo-G, is being developed by students and faculty from the University of Florida and is supported by Altera, Impulse Accelerated Technologies and GiDEL. The team expects the system to be assembled by the end of this week.

The Novo-G project is led by professors Alan George and Herman Lam at Florida. The goal of the Novo-G project and system is to advance and prove RC technologies at a level of scale, performance, and productivity unprecedented in this field, for applications from satellites to supercomputers.

Novo-G is based on PCI Express FPGA cards provided by GiDEL and populated with Stratix IIIs. Support for C programming of these cards has been enabled with an Impulse C Platform Support Package developed by Rafael Garcia at the CHREC lab, according to a statement released by Impulse Accelerated Technologies.

Several scalable applications are being developed for Novo-G by CHREC researchers, and a tomographic algorithm has also been provided by a University of Washington team, according to the statement.

According to the statement, the Novo-G team selected components for the project with an eye towardreliable, easy to use, scalable elements, with particular emphasis placed on ensuring the widest possible design entry point for the array.

Impulse C proved particularly accessible for non-hardware engineers, according to the statement. In one test, a student team used Impulse's automatic C to ModelSim test bench generator to expose three processes which got "stuck" checking for an eos on the sequence stream, according to the statement. This was re-confirmed using Impulse's graphical stage delay analysis, the company said.

"This project should really help establish benchmarks for the productivity of hardware/software codesign in which both algorithms and physical elements are adapted to maximize throughput," said Brian Durwood, co-founder of Impulse.

George said via email that the final shipment of components for the Novo-G machine arrived Wednesday (July 15) and that system assembly is well underway. Preliminary research ahead of the machine's arrival has been underway for some time, George said. The team expects the new Novo-G machine to be fully assembled and operational for R&D by the end of this week, George said.