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TITLE: Altera Launches High-Performance Computing University Program
SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Altera
Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced the development of a
new university program to support academic research into high-
performance computing. AMD, Sun Microsystems and XtremeData are
participating in the program that will donate $1 million in
workstations and development software to universities. Using the
workstations, participating universities will be able to research
and drive the adoption of FPGA co-processing for high-performance
computing applications such as medical imaging, data analytics,
text searches, network security, bioinformatics and energy.
"Supporting academic research into new applications and
architectures is a clear demonstration of the benefits of the
open and collaborative model of Torrenza, AMD's extensible system
bus program," said Doug O'Flaherty of the Advanced Technologies
Group at AMD. "This program is exactly what we envisioned when we
developed the open-architecture project, giving developers the
freedom to take high-performance computing to the next level."
"Our Sun Ultra 40 is the workstation-of-choice for many energy,
government, defense, and scientific research applications," said
Marc Hamilton, director HPC Solutions at Sun Microsystems. "For
many of these applications, FPGA co-processing can provide
further performance acceleration along with power and space
savings."
Twenty Sun Ultra 40 workstations, each powered by single or
dual-core AMD Opteron processors with Direct Connect Architecture
and an XtremeData XD1000 FPGA co-processor module, are being made
available under the program. The XD1000 co-processor module
includes Altera's largest Stratix(R) II FPGA, the EP2S180. The
FPGA module is pin-compatible with an AMD Opteron processor and
allows researchers to speed up algorithms running on the Sun
platform by up to 100 times and applications by up to 10 times.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, home of many of
the earliest and largest computer systems since 1952, is the
first university to receive workstations through the program. The
workstations will complement the "Trusted ILLIAC," a 500-
processor programmable hardware/software cluster that utilizes
FPGA co-processors to make large-scale computing more reliable
and secure.
"This combined effort creates a valuable new program that we can
immediately begin leveraging for our high-performance secure
computing research," said Professor Wen-mei Hwu, holder of the
Jerry Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in Electrical & Computer
Engineering, and leader of the Embedded and Enterprise Systems
Theme of Illinois' Information Trust Institute. "Research results
derived from the donated systems will aid the commercial adoption
of FPGA co-processing."
"We see FPGAs as an essential component of next-generation
parallel computing systems because programmable logic provides
the unique capability to customize and accelerate both
computation and memory system behavior," said Professor Kunle
Olukotun, of Stanford University's Computer Systems Lab. "FPGAs
are particularly valuable in a computer system's research
environment because they allow new architecture ideas to be
evaluated at hardware speeds."
"Universities will apply these systems to accelerate applications
with this new FPGA co-processor model," said Mike Strickland,
director strategic and technical marketing for Altera's computer
and storage business unit. "This cooperation results in a robust
solution which is of immediate value to many research programs."
For more information, access: Altera University Program
For additional information, access: EDA Cafe
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FILENUMBER: 1286
BEGIN_KEYWORDS
Altera High-Performance Computing University Program
END_KEYWORDS
DATE: August 2006
TITLE: Altera Launches High-Performance Computing University Program
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