SRC Computers Launches Its Next-Generation Reconfigurable High Performance Computing System; The SRC-7 Breaks Through the Last Technical Barriers to Widespread Adoption of General Purpose Reconfigurable Computing.COLORADO SPRINGS Colorado Springs, city (1990 pop. 281,140), seat of El Paso co., central Colo., on Monument and Fountain creeks, at the foot of Pikes Peak; inc. 1886. It is a year-round resort and a booming military, technological, and commercial city. , Colo. -- SRC Computers SRC Computers, Inc. is a privately owned company, established in 1996 in Colorado Springs, Colorado by Seymour Cray, shortly before his death on 1996-10-05 in a car accident. , Inc., a leader in reconfigurable computing See adaptive computing. systems, today announced the availability of its SRC-7 general purpose system featuring the first reconfigurable processor with IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, New York, www.ieee.org) A membership organization that includes engineers, scientists and students in electronics and allied fields. compliant floating point blocks and accompanying high bandwidth interconnect. The lack of dedicated low latency Low latency allows human-unnoticeable delays between an input being processed and the corresponding output providing real time characteristics. This can be especially important for internet connections utilizing services such as online gaming and VOIP - VOIP is not as important as floating point capability with enough memory bandwidth Memory bandwidth is the rate at which data can be read from or stored into a semiconductor memory by a processor. Memory bandwidth is usually expressed in units of bytes/second, though this can vary for systems with natural data sizes that are not a multiple of the commonly used to prevent stalling has historically been viewed as the last technical barrier to widespread adoption of general purpose reconfigurable computing. The SRC-7 succeeds the SRC-6 and provides the most powerful, programmer-friendly, reconfigurable, high performance system on the market. SRC's Carte(TM) programming environment allows programmers to use standard ANSI C (language, standard) ANSI C - (American National Standards Institute C) A revision of C, adding function prototypes, structure passing, structure assignment and standardised library functions. ANSI X3.159-1989. cgram is a grammar for ANSI C, written in Scheme. and Fortran to program its reconfigurable MAP(R) processors with no need for hardware design expertise. The announcement of the SRC-7 was made at the High Performance Reconfigurable Computing Workshop being held at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center The Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) is a research facility organized under the University of Alaska Fairbanks. It is funded by the United States Department of Defense, and is a member of the department's High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). in Fairbanks, Alaska Fairbanks (IPA: /ˈfɛərbæŋks/) is a Home Rule City in Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska, United States. . The increased performance of the SRC-7 series H MAP reconfigurable processors is highlighted by:
-- The first dedicated reconfigurable -- The largest per processor...
double precision floating point -- On-board SRAM at 80
capability with... Mbytes;
-- 112 double precision floating -- Total on board memory at
point operations per clock 2 Gbytes; and
per processor; and -- Reconfigurable logic
-- 224 single precision floating capacity at 64 Mgates.
point operations per clock
per processor.
-- The highest per processor... -- The capability for high
-- Floating point performance; bandwidth mass storage...
-- Sustained external memory -- Sustained disk bandwidth
payload bandwidth at 14.4 3.6 Gbytes per second;
Gbytes per second; -- 10K random IOPS per
-- Sustained on-board SRAM assembly;
payload bandwidth at 24 -- 32 Terabytes per
Gbytes per second; and assembly;
-- Sustained direct GPIO -- Accessible directly from
payload bandwidth at 10.3 MAP; and
Gbytes per second. -- Addressable through the
system's 64-bit virtual
address space.
"Once again SRC (SouRCe) Contrast with DST, which is an abbreviation of "destination." is showing the way in the world of reconfigurable computing," said Dr. Duncan A. Buell, Interim Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of South Carolina
• • . "Previous machines were sometimes memory access limited for parallel applications. But with its high bandwidth interconnect, large volume of close memory, plenty of parallel memory references, and dedicated floating point units, the SRC-7 is very impressive and possibly the most powerful reconfigurable machine for general purpose computation." Dr. Jeff Vetter, Future Technologies Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. , commented: "Since the installation of the first SRC system with MAP here in 1999, and more recently with our purchase of an SRC-6, ORNL ORNL Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been investigating the applicability of reconfigurable processing to computational science. We are currently working to port a variety of biology and nanoscience applications to the SRC-6 and believe that the SRC-7 is designed to deliver unprecedented floating-point performance for key scientific applications." The SRC-7 product line includes large-scale multi-processor systems, the MAPstation(TM) line of workstations, portable high-performance systems, and embedded offerings. The first SRC-7 MAPstations are expected to be available in the first quarter of 2006, with large-scale systems and servers following in the first half of 2006. SRC will continue to offer and support the SRC-6 series based on customer demand, and applications developed for SRC-6 systems are software compatible with the SRC-7. SRC systems are currently employed in a variety of market segments including defense, energy, scientific research, intelligence, molecular dynamics, bio-informatics, biometrics, image processing, real-time sensor processing, and geospatial mapping. "Since 2002, when we shipped our first SRC-6 system with Carte, programmers have been able to control both commodity and reconfigurable processors, using standard high level languages such as C, and attain orders of magnitude more performance," said Jon Huppenthal, President and CEO (1) (Chief Executive Officer) The highest individual in command of an organization. Typically the president of the company, the CEO reports to the Chairman of the Board. of SRC. "With the introduction of the SRC-7, SRC clearly takes a commanding lead in all aspects of general purpose reconfigurable computing." SRC is the only reconfigurable system vendor that provides this tightly integrated high-level language programming environment with both development and debug To correct a problem in hardware or software. Debugging software means locating the errors in the source code (the program logic). Debugging hardware means finding errors in the circuit design (logical circuits) or in the physical interconnections of the circuits. capability. As with the current SRC-6 product line, no hardware design knowledge is required by the programmer to use the SRC-7. About SRC SRC Computers, Inc. is a privately owned company established in 1996 by legendary computer architect Seymour Cray. SRC has developed an IMPLICIT+EXPLICIT(TM) architecture that provides orders of magnitude increases in performance over conventional microprocessors. Because this SRC-developed software and hardware architecture is applicable to products ranging from uniprocessor handheld devices to large-scale multiprocessor computer systems, SRC is able to offer solutions targeted at the high performance server and workstation markets as well as the embedded markets. In addition to its headquarters in Colorado Springs, SRC also maintains a software development facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Carte, MAPstation, IMPLICIT+EXPLICIT, and MAP are trademarks or registered trademarks of SRC Computers, Inc. SRC's website is located at www.srccomputers.com. Note to Editors: If you would like more information about SRC Computers or would like to schedule an interview with Mr. Huppenthal regarding this release, please call Valerie Jackson at 719-785-5119 or e-mail marketing@srccomputers.com. |
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