Edinburgh alliance claims FPGA computer saves energy

LONDON — A team in Scotland has developed a computer based on field programmable gate arrays to run applications that can be parallelized. The team claimed that such a computer can be more than ten times more power efficient than a conventional microprocessor-based computer.

The FPGA computer “Maxwell” was built by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The group claimed Maxwell is more computationally powerful than a conventional system of a similar size with ten times less power consumption.

Maxwell was designed and built by Nallatech Ltd. (Glasgow, England) and Alpha Data Ltd. (Edinburgh, Scotland).

The system consists of a 32-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosting 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over high-speed RocketIO. Maxwell differs from many FPGA-based systems in that the FPGAs are directly connected over RocketIO, the alliance said. This allows code to be parallelized across the collection of FPGAs and encourages algorithms to be written such that once the data and program are loaded onto the accelerator cards the processing occurs without data being transferred again across the PCI-X bus. This approach is key to delivering performance in a small footprint at low energy costs, the alliance said.

The efficiency of Maxwell has been demonstrated by porting three applications from the oil and gas, financial and medical imaging sectors to the system.