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Reconfigurable
Computing System Cards | PARAMNet-3 | PARAMNet-II
RECONFIGURABLE
COMPUTING SYSTEM CARD
Introduction
Reconfigurable Computing (RC) is an interesting paradigm to accelerate applications by targeting algorithms into programmable hardware.
One of the enabling technologies useful in RC is the field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Putting FPGAs on add-on cards or motherboards allow FPGAs to serve as compute-intensive co-processors. FPGAs can be re-configured over and over again, to perform multitude of operations. This enables application-specific, dynamically "programmable" hardware accelerators.
A number of Scientific & Engineering applications can find RC technology useful. To name a few: satellite networks with adaptive communication algorithms, scalable computing systems, Encryption/Decryption engines and Pattern recognition.
 C-DAC has pioneered the RC technology for HPC in India through its state-of-the-art design of re-configurable hardware, system software and hardware libraries ('Avatars'). Avatars are dynamically changeable circuits, corresponding to the compute intensive routines of the application code. C-DAC with its expertise in RC is capable of providing accelerated solutions for a wide spectrum of scientific and engineering areas.
Applications
Scientific and engineering applications in the areas of fracture mechanics, radio astronomy and bioinformatics are ported on RC, providing up to 240X speedup compared to purely software based solutions. These speedups can further increase by manyfolds, based on configuration and applications. In order to obtain same performance as RC hardware, one would otherwise require a huge cluster of computing nodes.
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Bioinformatics sequence search solution using RC, gave 240 times faster results.
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C-DAC's own fracture mechanics code, having double precision Cholesky factorization and forward-backward substitution steps ported on RC provided 16X speedup.
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High speed data acquisition and signal processing solutions designed for Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and power spectrum experimentation in radio astronomy, replaced a sizable computing cluster.
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Double precision matrix multiplication implemented on RC performed better than the Intel math kernel library.
RC Product Features
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Up to Twelve million gates, FPGAs for mapping compute intensive portions of application codes
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Standard bus interface like PCI/PCI-X/PCI Express
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System software Interface for all standard Linux distributions
RC in Supercomputing Cluster
Param Yuva is the latest 54 TF supercomputer from C-DAC. 16 nodes of this machine are incorporated with RC hardware creating a powerful and unique supercomputing environment. Based on the configuration and application, RC enabled node delivers performance comparable to hundreds of CPU cores.
In addition to increasing application performance by many folds, C-DAC's RC offers tremendous savings on power and space as compared to other technologies for application acceleration.
C-DAC's RC is a perfect solution for accelerating applications through 'Avatars' in areas as varied as life science and many more.
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