FPGA Journal: Saving Supercomputing with FPGAs - What We'll Do When We Hit the Wall

Massive racks of parallel processing Pentiums, Opterons, and Itaniums wasted watts at an unprecedented pace last week on the show floor at Supercomputing 2005 in Seattle. Teraflops, terabytes, and terrifying network bandwidths bombarded booth attendees looking for the last word in maximizing computational throughput. Convention center air conditioning worked overtime purging the byproducts of billions of bit manipulations per second as breaker boxes burst at the seams, straining to deliver adequate amperage to simultaneously power and cool what was probably the world’s largest temporary installation of high-performance computing equipment.

Starbridge and SGI Accelerate FPGA Computing Solutions for Solving Grand Challenge Problems

Companies deliver Hypercomputing® to software developers, researchers, and hardware designers

Seattle, WA– Nov. 15, 2005 –Starbridge Systems today announced a strategic relationship with Silicon Graphics (OTC: SGID) to further accelerate algorithm computation using field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs. SGI will provide Starbridge’s Viva® development software under a temporary license as part of its RASC™ (Reconfigurable Application-Specific Computing) development kit. The combined solution is capable of drastically decreasing compute time for computationally intensive applications over non-optimized systems. Starbridge will hold demonstrations of the collaborative system at its booth during SC|05 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking and Storage, November 12 – 18 in Seattle.