University of Florida preps Novo-G FPGA cluster

The CHREC team at the University of Florida has announced a new reconfigurable computing cluster.

The Novo-G system is being built using FPGA accelerator cards provided by GiDEL and Altera. The system will have 96 Altera Stratix-III FPGA devices, installed into 24 networked servers with 576GB of memory and 20Gb/s InfiniBand for interconnection.

According to Professor Alan George, the purpose of Novo-G is to “advance and prove reconfigurable computing 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 FPGAs provided by Altera. Support for C programming of these cards has been enabled with an Impulse C Platform Support Package (PSP) developed by Rafael Garcia at the CHREC lab.

More information about this project can be found here.

Altera announces 40nm Stratix IV

Gee, it seems like just yesterday that 90nm process was a big deal…
Altera announces 40-nm Stratix IV FPGAs and HardCopy IV ASICs

Altera and AMD webcast

Impulse gets a mention in this webcast sponsored by Altera and AMD, featuring Misha Burich (Altera) and Doug O’Flaherty (AMD):

Accelerate HPC Applications with FPGA Coprocessors

Who writes these headlines, anyway?

I mean this one:

XtremeData Volunteers to Serve as Intel’s FPGA Busboy

Tacky, groan-worthy headline aside, the story is that Intel now has multiple FPGA partners (I hope that doesn’t trigger thoughts of some other headline) in its push to promote FSB acceleration. XtremeData has already proven it’s able to deliver on AMD Opteron socket solutions, based on Altera FPGAs.

2008 will be an interesting year indeed for FPGA co-processor acceleration.