Maxwell FPGA supercomputer nominated for industry awards

26 November, 2007

The nominations recognise Maxwell’s unique combination of innovation and energy-efficiency. The categories are: Best Use of Green Technology Project Award and the BT Flagship Award for Innovation.

The FHPCA was established in 2004 to promote the use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an alternative to microprocessors. With traditional microprocessor-based solutions hitting performance limits, there is a growing need for new technologies that address the demand for ever greater processing capability, without large demands on space and power.

Using FPGAs, Maxwell requires much less space and cooling than a conventional system. It is also over 100 times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster.

Named after the Scottish physicist and creator of the first colour photograph, James Clerk Maxwell, the machine Maxwell has achieved impressive results in all three demonstrator projects:

•  Financial option pricing has been accelerated by over 300 times per node, taking less than a minute to do what used to take over four hours;

•  Three-dimensional video frames can be processed at over 8 frames per second, where previously each frame took nearly 15 seconds to analyse;

• Oil and gas simulations run over 5 times faster per node than a cluster of 3 GHz Xeon processors.

Technical specs:
The system consists of a 32-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosting 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over high-speed RocketIO. Maxwell differs from many FPGA-based systems in that the FPGAs are directly connected over RocketIO. This allows codes to be parallelised across the collection of FPGAs and encourages algorithms to be written so that once the data and program are loaded onto the accelerator cards, the processing occurs without data being transferred again across the PCI-X bus.

This approach is delivering previously unattainable performance in a surprisingly small footprint with very low energy costs. Several companies have been using Maxwell since its launch in March this year with impressive results have  achieved in the oil & gas and medical imaging sectors.

One of the first companies to use the supercomputer, Aberdeen-based Offshore Hydrocarbon Mapping plc (OHM), found that its application ran significantly faster on Maxwell. OHM is the world’s leading provider of Controlled Source Electromagnetic Imaging (CSEMI) services to the offshore oil industry.

Dr Lucy MacGregor, chief scientific officer of OHM, said: “Improving the performance of our data processing and visualisation services is key to our continued success and we are very excited about the code speed-ups we’ve achieved with Maxwell.”

Of course, many other sectors of industry could benefit too, particularly the financial sector. In order to demonstrate the power of FPGAs and the Maxwell system when handling Monte Carlo calculations for the investment banking sector, the Alliance decided to implement the Black Scholes algorithm which is commonly used to calculate future stock prices.

Spectacular results were obtained. In particular, the algorithm ran 320 times faster per FPGA on Maxwell than when compared to the equivalent algorithm running on the host PC. This demonstration of the Black Scholes algorithm shows the potential benefits of FPGAs to the financial sector and the Alliance is currently pursuing opportunities with several leading investment banks, some of whom have been conducting their own experiments with FPGAs.

Dr Mark Parsons, commercial director of EPCC says: “Maxwell has been created so that businesses can easily investigate FPGAs. We’ve already seen it give companies a competitive advantage. We want more businesses to come and test their codes on Maxwell to see whether it will be useful for them too.”

Maxwell was built by the FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance). The Alliance is led by EPCC at the University of Edinburgh and comprises Alpha Data, Nallatech, Xilinx, Algotronix, Scottish Enterprise and the iSLI. The BCS IT Industry Awards are the leading hallmark of success among practitioners in the IT industry today.

Web: http://www.fhpca.org
Source: http://www.chipdesignmag.com/display.php?articleId=1786