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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
XILINX CHIPS SELECTED AS RECONFIGURABLE COMPUTING
ENGINE
IN OCTIGABAY 12K
OctigaBay and Xilinx partner to accelerate high performance
computing applications
SAN JOSE, Calif., and VANCOUVER, Canada, November
3, 2003 Xilinx Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) and OctigaBay Systems Corp. today
announced that OctigaBay has integrated Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform
FPGAs into the OctigaBay 12K high performance computer. Purpose-built
for the engineering and scientific community, the OctigaBay 12K
combines technical innovations in interconnect, management and reconfigurable
computing to address the insatiable demand for high performance
computing resources.
The OctigaBay 12K incorporates six Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs into
each 3VU shelf to provide unprecedented application acceleration
capabilities. Tightly coupled with 12 AMD Opteron 64-bit processors
and a one terabit per second switch fabric-eliminating PCI bus limitations-
the FPGAs use standard message passing and memory copy operations
to simplify the software interaction and programming model.
The Xilinx Platform FPGAs act as application acceleration coprocessors,
providing superlinear speedup for applications like searching, sorting,
signal processing and encryption. The FPGAs also provide in-transit
processing-essentially performing calculations on data flows before
arriving at the destination processor-ideal for collective operations
like MPI all_reduce. In both situations, the Xilinx FPGAs offer
massive parallel speedup, resulting in better overall application
performance.
"An integral part of the OctigaBay 12K, Xilinx Virtex-II Pro
Platform FPGAs provided the ultimate connectivity platform addressing
our high-performance, high-speed system requirements," said
John Seminerio, President and CEO of OctigaBay. "Not only does
this translate to better price/performance, it also results in faster
time-to-market."
"OctigaBay's application of our Platform FPGAs demonstrates
the emerging role of programmable logic in the field of reconfigurable
computing," said Sandeep Vij, vice president of worldwide marketing
at Xilinx "and the unique OctigaBay architecture will open
up whole new avenues of research and exploration for the high performance
computing community."
Matt Leininger, principal member of the technical staff from Sandia
National Laboratories, agrees "We've been seriously investigating
the use of FPGAs and their potential to rapidly accelerate scientific
and engineering computations. The combination of high performance
commodity processors, FPGAs, and a balanced communication bandwidth
is a flexible design that hold significant promise for us to accelerate
our research."
About the OctigaBay 12K
The revolutionary architectural design of the OctigaBay 12K outperforms
existing SMP platforms, while the use of off-the-shelf components
dramatically reduces overall cost. Each OctigaBay 12K shelf provides:
- 12 AMD Opteron 64-bit x-86 compatible processors for 58 GFLOPS;
- HPC-optimized Linux operating system;
- 12 specialized communications processors and a 1 Tb/s embedded
switching fabric provide up to 8 GB/s to each AMD Opteron with
1 microsecond latency;
- Dedicated system management software, hardware and supervisory
network;
- Active Manager GUI for ease of operation, maintenance and management;
and
Six Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) processors for application
acceleration.
Up to 12 OctigaBay 12K shelves can be assembled in a single rack,
providing 691 GFLOPS of processing power. OctigaBay 12K systems
scale to over 12,000 processors without requiring any external switches.
The OctigaBay 12K system will be featured at SuperComputing 2003
in Phoenix, AZ, November 17 - 19, 2003. Systems will be commercially
available early in 2004.
About Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs
The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro family is the world's first and only FPGA
to offer integrated PowerPC embedded technology and 3.125 Gbps serial
transceivers. Virtex-II Pro devices include these multiple PowerPC
CPUs and multi-gigabit serial transceivers at no additional charge,
providing unequaled capability and value for today's system design
requirements. With over 10,000 worldwide customer engagements, Virtex-II
Pro FPGAs have seen rapid adoption in a wide-range of applications.
About OctigaBay Systems Corporation
OctigaBay Systems Corporation is pioneering an innovative new class
of High Performance Computing products that delivers the performance
of high-end SMP systems at a fraction of the cost. Addressing the
most challenging needs of business and research institutions, OctigaBay's
products are ideal for simulation, modeling, searching, sorting,
data mining and other processing intensive applications. For more
information, please visit www.octigabay.com
or contact us at info@octigabay.com.
About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic
solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.
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