The University of Edinburgh has built an
energy-efficient supercomputer that does not rely on power hungry
microprocessors.
The university is hoping its technology will catch on amongst
big computer users faced with spiralling energy costs.
The Maxwell supercomputer is based on technology invented in
Scotland and constructed by the FPGA High Performance Computing
Alliance. The system uses Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) as
an alternative to conventional microprocessors.
More powerful than a conventional system of a similar size and
using ten times less power, Maxwell is delivering new levels of
computational performance for real-world industrial applications,
said the university.
Maxwell has been built using FPGA technology designed and
manufactured by Scottish SMEs Nallatech and Alpha Data. It uses
next generation FPGAs provided by Xilinx, a leading FPGA
company.
Maxwell’s power has already been demonstrated by porting three
numerically intensive applications from the oil and gas, financial
and medical imaging sectors.
The FHPCA (FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance) has spent
the past two years and £3.6m, including funding from Scottish
Enterprise, developing Maxwell.
Maxwell is being aimed at industrial sectors such as drug
design, military defence, seismology, medical imaging, mobile
telecoms, computer modelling, and financial engineering.
Graham Smart, managing director of Alpha Data, said, "FPGAs have
grown up over recent years. Dramatic improvements in density, speed
and cost enable these devices to perform compute bound applications
hundreds of times faster than conventional processors.”
During 2007–2008, FHPCA will run a series of seminars to
introduce Maxwell to UK industrial sectors. The first event will be
in Edinburgh in May this year.
Click here for a short
online movie explaining more about Maxwell and the FHPCA
IBM ‘supercomputer on a chip’ goes into production
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