Date: 18/11/2010

Stratix IV FPGAs inside CHREC designed supercomputer

Altera Corporation has announced that the Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC) has selected the company's Stratix IV FPGAs for its latest update to the Novo-G supercomputer. Altera says Stratix IV devices enabled CHREC to increase the system memory and acceleration of the supercomputer by two times. CHREC was able to realize a greater performance-to-cost ratio with modest increases in size, power and cooling-a feat rarely achieved in conventional supercomputer upgrades.

"CHREC chose Altera Stratix IV FPGAs to provide our international team of academic researchers with a faster and more efficient platform for testing applications and tools that showcase the advantages of reconfigurable computing on a large scale," said Dr. Alan George, professor of ECE at the University of Florida and CHREC director. "Altera's devices uniquely provided the performance, scalability, power and cooling advantages we needed, as well as the ability to combine the versatility, flexibility and efficiency of a general-purpose processor."

"In the information age, the need for algorithm acceleration for processing data is growing exponentially. The Stratix IV FPGAs in CHREC's Novo-G system are allowing academic research teams to double the FPGA logic and attached memory within the same data center space," said David Gamba, director of the computer applications business unit at Altera. "Altera is proud to be sponsoring the innovative research being done by CHREC and the Novo-G members."