Not a Hardware Designer? Don't Worry.

Mitrionics is calling it a first, "A revolutionary new development platform that will make FPGA-based high performance computing (HPC) accessible to the masses." The new technology allows FPGAs to be programmed faster, easier, and more affordably than is possible with any existing development tool. The Mitrion solution is the alleged only FPGA programming tool that does not require hardware programming or hardware design experience, yet it achieves pushbutton software-to-hardware compilation. Because Mitrionics has removed the barriers of high price, extreme complexity, and long development times, HPC is now accessible to entirely new markets and segments of scientists and developers.

Commercially available in Q3 of 2005, the Mitrion Development Platform allows FPGAs to be programmed in days. Using the Mitrion C Programming Language, 180 lines of code generates 150,000 lines of VHDL (Very high speed integrated circuits – Hardware Description Language). FPGA-based high performance computing generally provides an application acceleration of 10x – 100x.

“While other FPGA-based programming tools claim to shave days, weeks, or months off of programming an FPGA, Mitrionics completes the task from start to finish in a matter of days or weeks,” stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. “We’re most excited because now a significantly greater number of scientists and developers can begin developing HPC applications to make discoveries and solve real problems in life sciences, geosciences, and other industries.”

"We're actually broadening the market base. We're not talking about embedded systems or signal processing, the traditional programmable logic applications. Instead, it's the HPC area where people use computers for computation, not as a part of a product. SGI and Cray are two of the largest vendors putting FPGAs into computers with multiple processors and multiple FPGAs, and we support both their efforts," said Dellson. "People have been talking about FPGAs having this potential. The reason it didn't happen before is that until now there was no good way of programming an FPGA when you see it as part of your own computer. You want it to be easily reprogrammable. The standard design flows that are currently used are jus far too complex and too expensive. That's a barrier for HPC users."

Although FPGAs are flexible enough to allow for very complex designs, including advanced computation, most HPC users do not have the hardware design skills to use them. And, current FPGA design tools do not provide an efficient method for programming computation, since the level of abstraction is too low. Implementing even simple computational algorithms takes months or years, and results in very inflexible designs.

The Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit make it possible to program FPGAs for HPC applications on a true software level. This dramatically reduces the total cost for FPGA programming, and more importantly benefits the entire general purpose HPC market.

The Mitrionics Virtual Processor is a software-created abstract machine that sits between the program and the hardware, enabling developers to implement and test algorithms strictly using a high-level software approach. The development tools then automatically take care of building a Mitrion Virtual Processor optimized for the application and mapping it onto the FPGA chip.

The processor performs thousands of operations simultaneously by allocating multiple computation units for each instruction. This massive parallelism comes from the fine-grain nature of the processing elements, allowing every individual operation in the program to be run in parallel.

Another feature of the Mitrion Virtual Processor is its low power consumption, which is typically less than 2% of a CPU, based solution. Additionally, the developer does not need to consider hardware specific issues, such as timing achievements and system design, which is taken care of by the programming tools.

The Mitrion Software Development Kit includes a compiler, graphical debugger and code simulator, and processor configurator. A c/C++ library is included for easy integration with the application running on the host CPU. The debugger gives the programmer a hierarchical view of all the parallel processes and their interactions making it easy to find programming errors, performance bottlenecks and inefficient code. All the common debugging tools, such as watchpoints, breakpoints, and call-dependencies are included. The kit runs under all major operating systems including Linux and Windows.

Virtually any industry that currently utilizes HPC applications is a potential application, such as genomics, pharmaceutical, oil and gas, manufacturing, aerospace, and financial and even mobile applications.

According to Dave Alexander, Engineering Director, SPE Silicon Graphics, Inc., "What's going to excite the users is performance, especially with the large, high-performance FPGAs with 90nm process technology. This gives engineers the potential to create hardware implementations custom tailored to the application. Given an embarrassingly parallel application, you can build on an FPGA a logic structure with 10's, 100's, or 1,000's of parallel execution engines. Given an algorithm that performed 100's or 1000's of operations on data, a stream-processing engine can be built to perform all the operations with every cycle of the clock. The result is order-of-magnitude speedups on applications/algorithms with these characteristics."

Alexander added that allowing the logic to be custom tailored to the application dramatically reduces the size/power/weight for a given level of computational performance. This is the result of minimizing the amount of unproductive logic rather than allowing unproductive logic to burn power and take up silicon space. In this case, FPGAs can be used in mobile environments (such as UAVs), previously relegated to ground-based "data-center" situations.

"What brings SGI to the party is the tight coupling of these FPGAs into a high-performance data-centric system architecture, which enables data movement to and from the FPGA at rates that are limited only by the FPGA itself. It enables a whole class of applications to take advantage of FPGAs," added Alexander.

There is an early access program currently available for the Mitrion Platform that will launch in October. A perpetual license to run the Mitrion Virtual Processor on a single FPGA is $7,000. Significant volume discounts are available.