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Deal helps high-performance computing designers leverage the power of an FPGA Salt Lake City, Utah and Baltimore, Md.—Taking the lead in addressing strategic markets for field programmable gate array (FPGA) systems, Starbridge Systems and Nallatech today announced a worldwide strategic partnership that offers a unique combination of software, hardware and services suited for high-performance computing applications. These combined offerings make the power of FPGAs accessible to system engineers involved in high-performance computing applications in markets such as defense and military, homeland security and bioinformatics. “This strategic alliance is truly a case of taking the best elements of two companies to establish a powerful, scalable and affordable computing system for demanding applications,” said Allan Cantle, CEO of Nallatech. “Starbridge’s Viva provides a powerful and easy-to-use front end tool for Nallatech’s FPGA-based hardware systems.” With Starbridge’s Viva, a fully integrated, object oriented, graphical development environment, developers can create efficient custom circuitry for running complex algorithms directly in the FPGA hardware of Nallatech’s reconfigurable computer systems. Viva algorithms can be tuned for maximum performance (by using more hardware), smallest physical size (by using very few gates), or anything in between. Although this partnership will not immediately yield new products, the deal will make it much easier for system engineers in high-performance computing space to leverage the power of FPGAs. In an interview with Star Bridge Systems’ president and chief executive, Kurt Dobson, and Nallatech’s president and chief executive, Allan Cantle, the executives discussed how dovetailing the two companies’ existing products will drive the reconfigurable FPGA computing market still in its infancy and cut design time. “Up until now, the customer has had to buy the best in class from the likes of Nallatech and Star Bridge and work by themselves to get the two tools working together,” Cantle said. “If an end user is new to the industry, there could be a difficult set of barriers to get over trying to get the pieces of the pie to work together.” The latest deal combines Nallatech’s DimeTALK and Star Bridge’s Viva FPGA development software. DimeTALK is a software tool that enables developers to design packet-based communications networks across multiple FPGAs. The networks are then provided to the user through an automatic code generation mechanism for deployment within their application design. Star Bridge’s Viva is a graphical development environment for programming FPGAs. Viva was designed to enable engineers to quickly design, prototype, test, debug, simulate, optimize, and then run their programs in FPGAs. These designs can then be easily inserted into the target environment through API calls to the target reconfigurable hardware from C in Linux or Windows environments. With Viva, developers can create custom circuitry for running complex algorithms directly in the FPGA hardware of Nallatech’s reconfigurable computing systems. Viva algorithms can be adjusted to meet certain performance requirements. According to Dobson, using FPGA development tools in the reconfigurable high-performance computing applications, such as defense and military, homeland security and bioinformatics, is a new and emerging industry. Both companies believe that it’s important to take steps to abstract the user away from changes in the hardware and software layers so when they go through the trouble of writing applications and algorithms as the hardware platforms change and new generations of Xilinx Inc.’s FPGAs hatch, their needs may change in terms of the number of FPGAs that are required to do a particular application. “The combination that Nallatech has in terms of their DimeTALK architecture that abstracts that hardware layer away and the way that Star Bridge’s Viva system descriptions are written, allow the user to write out algorithms in a way that their investment is usable,” Dobson said. And since using FPGA development tools in the reconfigurable high-performance computing applications is still a developing market, the executives are working diligently to help put standards in place. OpenFPGA is an emerging effort by the Ohio Supercomputer Center to accelerate the adoption of reconfigurable computing-based solutions in high-performance computing and enterprise application environments. A standards body in Scotland called FPGA high-performance computing allowance (FHPCA) is also working to establish standards. “We’re trying to get the OpenFPGA and FHPCA to collaborate together,” said Cantle, who is involved in the FHPCA standards body. “We’re trying to draw some open standards between the interfaces between the companies in the value chain.” |
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