SGI Builds FPGA Supercomputer, Boosts Nucleotide

By DE Editors

SGI (Sunnyvale, CA) announced it built what it is calling “the world’s largest Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) supercomputer configuration,” with 70 FPGAs, then ran a broadly used bioinformatics application more than 900 times faster than the same application would run on a traditional cluster, according to the release.

SGI’s FPGA supercomputer accelerated the performance of a complex BLAST-n query by more than 900 times, completing in less than 33 minutes what took a 68-node Opteron-based cluster approximately three weeks to finish. The application matched 20 nucleotide base pairs against 600,000 queries.

SGI configured the system using off-the-shelf components, including its SGI RASC (Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing) appliance for bioinformatics — using Mitrion-Accelerated BLAST-n. No hardware or software was modified for the test.

To bring the benefits of FPGAs to more users, SGI unveiled the new SGI RC200 blade. The new blade is the first to bring SGI RASC technology to SGI Altix XE and SGI Altix ICE clusters and blade servers, both of which are based on Intel Xeon processors.

Each RC200 blade combines multiple Altera high-performance Stratix III FPGAs to create the most powerful FPGA module available. It also uses the Intel QuickAssist technology accelerator abstraction layer to provide a connection to the front side bus of the Xeon processor.

For more information on SGI RASC solutions or the SGI RC200 blade, go to SGI.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.