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FOCUS: HARDWAREFPGA:a new breed of supercomputerRob Baxter and Mark Parsons, EPCCGraham Fairlie, Scottish Enterprise,Scotland is leading an ambitious project to build an excitingnext-generation supercomputer with spectacular processingcapabilities – and EPCC is at the forefront.The FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance (FHPCA)will showcase Scotland’s expertise in the developmentof computers built using ultra high-performance chipscalled Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and couldrevolutionise the way mission-critical applications aredesigned in industries such as defence, life-sciences andenergy.Scottish Enterprise has mobilised £3.6m funding and a worldclasscollaboration of industry, academic and governmentexperts to lead the pioneering three-year project.Managed by EPCC, Europe’s leading high-performancecomputing centre, the project will draw on effort andtechnology from across the Alliance partners – Xilinx, the$10 billion NASDAQ-listed global supplier of programmablelogic devices based in San Jose, California; Nallatech, basedin Glasgow, which has pioneered the development of highperformanceFPGA computing solutions for ten years;and Alpha Data, based in Edinburgh, which specialises indesigning FPGA systems for customers including Boeing,Lockheed Martin and Motorola.It will also draw upon theexpertise of Dr Tom Kean ofAlgotronix who undertookpioneering work in thisfield, and the Institute forSystem Level Integrationwho will contribute to thedissemination of skills andknowledge into Scotland’sdesign and applicationcompanies. The firstcommercial computerbased on these devices was designed in Scotland in 1991 byAlgotronix and this new project builds on Scotland’s worldclassreputation in the fields of both FPGA technology andhigh performance computing.FPGAs have potentially many times the processing powerof conventional microprocessors because their hardwareis reconfigurable – algorithms and complex numericalfunctions can be programmed directly onto the silicon,unlike conventional microprocessors which rely on softwareto give them flexibility, software which makes themslower. On FPGAs, certain algorithms have been shown torun over 1,000 times faster than the fastest off-the-shelfmicroprocessors.Systems built with FPGAs are also considerably morecompact than conventional systems and a new design can bereconfigured by downloading it and then, by using softwaretools, activate their internal ‘switches’.Until now, FPGAs have been too small in terms of capacityand too expensive to make a supercomputer system feasible.But in recent years the chips have got much cheaper whiletheir capacity has massively increased, meaning they arenow becoming widely adopted in mainstream embeddedcomputing.The partners aim to use off-the-shelf components and customsoftware to produce a computer with 1 teraflop of processingpower, equivalent to 200 times the speed of the highestperforming Pentium processor.Rather than targeting one particular application or market,this supercomputer is designed as a general-purpose systemtargeting many potential applications and markets. Thepartners initially aim to develop two or three demonstrationapplications to illustrate the scope and scale of thesupercomputer.Continued opposite.6