Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Eric: Day1 at mrsc Belfast

Greetings reader(s)... I'm posting on behalf of Eric, whose email works, but web doesn't.

Here's a quick synopsis of the first day of workshops.
Attended the workshop for SGI and Mitrion. Seems that SGI has aligned strongly with Intel and is embracing Quick Assist as the portable accelerator platform. Its working for portable applications, but has some room to evolve to match functionality in RASC implementation. Exciting to see that customers are now approaching SGI following demonstration of 70 FPGA system running an application of mainstream interest.
There was a discussion of the RC300 which will merge the RC100 and RC200 product lines. Vendor for FPGA component was not disclosed.

There were a number of informal discussions on OpenFPGA with attendees in new areas of potential interest for developing industry standards.

Mitrion presented on their Mitrion-C programming language and illustrated the changes needed to about 1300 lines of code to make BLAST accelerate with Mitrion-C. 1300 lines out of a million plus lines of code isn't a bad percentage for porting a large application.

Opening of the conference comes tomorrow. Looking for an exciting set of presentations.

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