[FIRM] Vortragsankündigung (Dienstag, 27.01.2009)

[Sabri Pllana]

V O R T R A G S A N K Ü N D I G U N G

Ort:  	Institut für Scientific Computing, Universität Wien
	Nordbergstraße 15/C/3.OG, 1090 Wien, Raum C316
Datum: 	Dienstag, 27.01.2009.
Zeit: 	09:00 c.t.
		
Title: 	"Accelerate Your Applications with Mitrionics Hybrid Computing 
Systems"
Speaker: Robert Wall, Mitrionics AB, Lund, Sweden

Abstract: The good old days, when you could sit back and relax, waiting 
for a new generation of CPUs to effectively double the performance of 
your existing software are gone. Lately, CPU clock frequencies have 
reached a practical limit at around 3GHz, and your software needs a 
major rewrite to take advantage of the capabilities of today’s many-core 
CPUs. The good news is you can turn this effort to your advantage by 
making use of software accelerators. These can provide an order of 
magnitude faster execution for certain computations, and be combined 
with traditional CPUs to form Hybrid Computing systems that deliver 
10-100 times the performance of a non-accelerated solution. The Mitrion 
Software Acceleration Platform has been developed for the sole purpose 
of allowing software developers to benefit from FPGA-based software 
acceleration, without having to deal with the complexities of hardware 
design. What makes the Mitrion Software Acceleration Platform unique is 
that it introduces a processor as an abstraction layer, the Mitrion 
Virtual Processor (MVP) between the FPGA hardware and the software that 
is to be run. While other programming solutions for FPGAs attempt to 
produce circuit designs directly from a high level language, Mitrionics 
adds the MVP, which executes the software on the FPGA. The benefit is 
that the processor gives a complete separation of software from 
hardware, and the software developer is isolated from all aspects of 
FPGA hardware design. With the MVP, all the circuit design is already 
taken care of and is delivered as part of the Mitrion SDK.