enygma
11-15-2006, 09:27 PM
TAMPA, FL -- November 14, 2006 --To expand industry adoption of the AMD Torrenza initiative and an open-standards approach to innovation, AMD (NYSE:AMD) announced today at Supercomputing 2006 it will be the inaugural sponsor for OpenFPGA. OpenFPGA is a non-profit consortium focused on accelerating the adoption and incorporation of reconfigurable computing solutions in high-performance and enterprise computing. OpenFPGA steering group members include many of today’s leaders in high-performance computing including Cray, GE Research, Oak Ridge National Labs and Sandia National Labs.
AMD also announced, in conjunction with the Computer Architecture Group at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the creation of the Mannheim Center of Excellence (COE), for research for HyperTransport™ technology. As the only current academic licensee of coherent HyperTransport (cHT), the research at the Mannheim COE is expected to directly benefit the academic community and the development of next-generation technology that leverages HyperTransport. Early results from the Mannheim COE research include the release of an HTX board for universities and companies that research compute-intensive testing and design applications.
“These activities in support of Torrenza represent fresh thinking in the application of open standards in creating collaborative research environments that can directly benefit customers,” said Michael Goddard, director, Performance Computing, AMD. “Academic customers are already seeing the results of the HyperTransport expertise the Mannheim COE can deliver, while OpenFPGA is leveraging best practices to provide a programming model for FPGAs, one of the co-processing technologies embraced by Torrenza. Ultimately, these efforts will further the adoption of HyperTransport technology and computing based on Direct Connect Architecture, offering new levels of stability and upgradeability in open environments such as AMD64.”
>>> MORE (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~114148,00.html)
OpenFPGA (http://www.openfpga.org)
SaarCOR (http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/) (FPGA based raytracing)
As a personal adage to this, I've believed for years now that intense rendering tasks should be offloaded to hardware such as FPGAs. Where the FPGA comes in is that the hardware is reconfigurable, allow it to perform application specific tasks at high rates of speed, and then be reprogrammed for another application specific task. The OpenFPGA movement is an attempt at trying to develop a common API and development platform for porting more abstract programming languages such as C, down to a hardware description language like Verilog or VHDL, and inevitable, be routed into hardware.
As an example to this article, I came across a couple companies that have developed adapters for allowing Altera (http://www.xtremedatainc.com/xd1000_brief.html) and Xilinx (http://www.drccomputer.com/) FPGAs to run on socket 940.
AMD also announced, in conjunction with the Computer Architecture Group at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the creation of the Mannheim Center of Excellence (COE), for research for HyperTransport™ technology. As the only current academic licensee of coherent HyperTransport (cHT), the research at the Mannheim COE is expected to directly benefit the academic community and the development of next-generation technology that leverages HyperTransport. Early results from the Mannheim COE research include the release of an HTX board for universities and companies that research compute-intensive testing and design applications.
“These activities in support of Torrenza represent fresh thinking in the application of open standards in creating collaborative research environments that can directly benefit customers,” said Michael Goddard, director, Performance Computing, AMD. “Academic customers are already seeing the results of the HyperTransport expertise the Mannheim COE can deliver, while OpenFPGA is leveraging best practices to provide a programming model for FPGAs, one of the co-processing technologies embraced by Torrenza. Ultimately, these efforts will further the adoption of HyperTransport technology and computing based on Direct Connect Architecture, offering new levels of stability and upgradeability in open environments such as AMD64.”
>>> MORE (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~114148,00.html)
OpenFPGA (http://www.openfpga.org)
SaarCOR (http://graphics.cs.uni-sb.de/SaarCOR/) (FPGA based raytracing)
As a personal adage to this, I've believed for years now that intense rendering tasks should be offloaded to hardware such as FPGAs. Where the FPGA comes in is that the hardware is reconfigurable, allow it to perform application specific tasks at high rates of speed, and then be reprogrammed for another application specific task. The OpenFPGA movement is an attempt at trying to develop a common API and development platform for porting more abstract programming languages such as C, down to a hardware description language like Verilog or VHDL, and inevitable, be routed into hardware.
As an example to this article, I came across a couple companies that have developed adapters for allowing Altera (http://www.xtremedatainc.com/xd1000_brief.html) and Xilinx (http://www.drccomputer.com/) FPGAs to run on socket 940.