Maxeler introduces MAX-1 for seismic data processing

November 22nd, 2006

High Performance Computing applications for seismic analysis are using clusters of hundreds or even thousands of processor nodes in parallel to achieve the required throughput. Maxeler has introduced a technology delivering speed up factors of about an order of magnitude per node, depending on the application. The acceleration comes with minimal increase in power consumption, using Xilinx Virtex-4 FX100 or FX60 FPGAs.

The latest news from Maxeler is the achievement of 1,680MB/sec sustained bus throughput on our PCI Express x8 board. Our FPGA device driver performs zero-copy overhead, multi-array DMA transfers and overlaps DMA transfers to/from the FPGA with computation on the x86 CPU.

Maxeler’s Chairman, Michael J. Flynn is justifiably excited by this development. He is keen to point out how this massive throughput transforms the performance of the FPGA as an acceleration technology. "Our systems approach to Geophysics applications overcomes the difficult tasks of accelerating seismic applications with FPGAs despite the traditional communication bottleneck between FPGA, CPU and memory." Flynn said. "Our new board and driver combination overcomes this bottleneck and allows us to deliver a complete solution."

Maxeler has been part of a joint project with the Stanford Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science to develop acceleration of seismic software developed at Stanford. The project goes beyond the core hardware accelerator by looking at the complete problem including software restructuring, partitioning and selection of optimal hardware platforms, while maintaining application flexibility.

One significant advantage of FPGAs for acceleration is the ability to reconfigure the device to the application. FPGAs are ‘off the shelf’ devices which achieve massive acceleration by performing software operations as hardware circuits. FPGAs are widely used in many applications, operate at data rates and draw little power. Adding the Maxeler FPGA hardware and software solutions to each node in an HPC cluster significantly increases application speed or alternatively allows smaller cluster sizes to deliver higher processing throughput, saving cost and power budgets.

MAX-G software tools partition the seismic data processing application and provide a robust interface for the application programmer to use all of the power of the accelerator within a standard C/C++, graphical or scripting environment.

Maxeler Technologies Inc. is a provider of acceleration software solutions for geophysics, financial modelling and aerospace applications.

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