Accelerate. Integrate. Interface. 10-100x High Performance Computing

For many high performance applications the alternative to the multicore rack is to use an accelerator assist to each multicore node. There are a number of instances of these accelerators: GPGPU, Specialized processors (i.e. IBM’s Cell) and FPGAs.

At Maxeler we’ve found that the FPGA array technology wins out on performance for most relevant applications. Given the initial area-time-power disadvantage of the FPGA in (say) a custom designed adder this is a surprising result. The sheer magnitude of the available FPGA parallelism overcomes the initial disadvantage.

Details of event:

Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium
4:15PM, Wednesday, May 13, 2009
HP Auditorium, Gates Computer Science Building B01
http://ee380.stanford.edu

Topic: Accelerating computation with FPGAs with a seismic computation example.

About the speaker:

Michael Flynn is now Professor Emeritus of EE at Stanford. He directed the Architecture and Arithmetic group in CSL for many years. He is now Senior Adviser and Board Chairman at Maxeler.

TechAffair.com sits down with Andreas S. Weigend, Ph.D. former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com and the author of over 100 scientific papers on the application of machine learning techniques to finance and business problems. Here, Andreas tells us what the Social Data Revolution is: connecting data, social data.

He currently lectures at Stanford, Berkeley and Tsinghua Universities on the application of data analysis to electronic business problems.

Andreas Weigend advises exciting startups and consults for established firms including Alibaba, Best Buy, Lufthansa, MySpace, and Nokia; helping some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs and executives around the world leverage user data to create innovative products and business models.

Video filmed and produced by Shaun Tai.

FYI: I connect to the internet with a Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router. Check it out!