Modular FPGA board for extreme hardware-accelerated computing

Those clever chaps and chappesses at Pico Computing have just announced the release of their M-503 M-Series Module.  The most powerful and flexible of the M-Series, the M-503 addresses the ever-increasing demands for memory and I/O bandwidth for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications in the bioinformatics, image processing, and signal processing domains.

The M-503 features a Xilinx Virtex-6 LX240T FPGA with two independent banks of DDR3 SODIMM providing 17 GB/s of local memory bandwidth to the FPGA.  In addition to the DDR3, there are three independent banks of QDRII SRAM capable of 10.8 GB/s of sustained random access memory bandwidth.

There are two x8 Gen2 PCIe links provided via Xilinx's PCIe endpoint on the Virtex-6.  Eighty (80) LVDS and eight (8) GTX transceivers are available via a high speed high density connector to create direct M-503 to M-503 connections or direct access to SSDs, 10GigE and other peripherals.  The M-503 will also be available with the Virtex-6 LX365T, LX550T, SX315T or SX475T FPGAs.

An exciting innovation on the M503 is the HIT (Heterogeneous Interconnect Technology). The HIT is a combination of extremely low latency differential IO interfaces (80 pairs at 1.0 Gb/s each) and extremely fast multi-standard serial IO interfaces (8 GTX transceivers at up to 5 Gb/s). Using customizable mezzanine interconnect boards (either passive or active), or customized hi-speed cables, any combination of parallel mass-storage, multi-standard network connectivity, and board-box-rack interconnect topology can be achieved. This HIT extends the reconfigurability native in FPGAs into the entire architecture of data centers, enabling system-level architecture optimization.
 

The folks at Pico say that the introduction of the M-503 module extends the scalability and general-purpose nature of their FPGA cluster products into many more application domains. Used in conjunction with the EX-500 PCIe backplane, Pico is able to "cluster" three M-503s per PCIe slot or in their SC5 SuperCluster, up to 18 M-503s in a 5U Chassis.  The first M-503 based SC5 SuperCluster will ship this month to an unidentified launch customer.
 
Pico Computing will demonstrate its M-503 module at the International Conference for High Performance Computing 2010 (SC10) November 13-19, 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana.