London, 14 October 2011 – Maxeler Technologies, pioneer of Maximum Performance Computing and provider of complete HPC acceleration solutions, today announced it is joining 7 other organizations across Europe in a multi-national research project to further exploit the capabilities of reconfigurable silicon chips for real-world applications.
Reconfigurable FPGA hardware is well established as being capable of delivering 10-100x greater performance per unit of space, power or cost than general purpose CPUs for a wide range of applications. FPGAs are silicon chips that can change their function, dynamically modifying the functionality of different parts of the chip during operation to morph between different circuits. The FASTER research project aims to develop easy-to-use tools to enable programmers to change the chip functionality while running real applications, allowing run-time reconfiguration to be exploited to further improve the performance advantage of reconfigurable accelerators over general purpose systems.
FASTER, funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Technological Development, is a 3 year research program that brings together 8 organizations from the commercial and academic world. FASTER is initially targeting applications in the fields of computational earth science, 3D rendering and image processing and network intrusion detection.
“Our reconfigurable accelerator hardware already achieves 30x speedup for many applications,” said Oliver Pell, VP of Engineering at Maxeler. “We believe the technology arising from the FASTER project has the potential to add a new dimension to our capabilities and further boost this advantage.”
About FASTER
FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) is a multi-national research project funded by European Union’s Seventh Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Technological Development. The commercial partners in the project are Maxeler Technologies, ST Microelectronics and Synelixis. University partners are Chalmers University of Technology, Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas, Ghent University, Imperial College London and Politecnico di Milano. The project runs for 3 years, beginning in September 2011. Please see www.fp7-faster.eu for more information.
About Maxeler
Maxeler Technologies, Inc. pioneers Maximum Performance Computing. It combines high performance computing (HPC) consulting with custom acceleration technology to deliver competitive advantage. Its complete and scalable solutions include hardware platforms, software programming tools and application consulting. Maxeler’s technology enables organisations to speed up processing times by 20-50x, with over 90% reduction in energy usage and over 95% reduction in data centre space.