November 13, 2006 -- XtremeData Inc. today announced that its XD1000 socket-compatible coprocessors will be compatible with the Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Development Platform for FPGA Supercomputing application acceleration. XtremeData develops programmable solutions that can accelerate time-critical algorithms by leveraging the flexibility of Xilinx and Altera fFPGAs. XtremeData coprocessors plug directly into AMD64 Opteron processor sockets and can be configured to accelerate graphics, XML, floating-point, video transcoding, and other applications. The XD1000 is able to leverage all of the resources available on the motherboard: dedicated DDR memory modules, CPU core power supply, HyperTransport bus to the host Opteron, and device cooling. XtremeData target markets for FPGA application acceleration include imaging, communications, bio-informatics, and enterprise computing.

"Parallelism is the key to FPGA supercomputing application acceleration, but till now there has been one serious barrier to FPGAs in HPC," said Ravi Chandran, CEO of XtremeData. "The hardware-oriented design flow environment is ill-suited to this market. A higher level of abstraction, via a software-oriented design flow, is necessary for broad adoption. Mitrionics enables this high-level flow with its innovative 'processor' approach to designing FPGAs."

FPGA Supercomputing is an exciting and growing market segment based on technology that enables processor performance acceleration 10x to 100x greater than traditional processors. Scientists, developers, and researchers strive to improve productivity by achieving faster performance in their supercomputing applications and lower power consumption in their systems. The software-centric Mitrion Platform is ideal because it allows FPGA supercomputing applications to be developed without any circuit design skills. Key application areas that stand to benefit most from FPGA supercomputing are bioinformatics, oil and gas, imaging, and financial industries.

The core of the Mitrion Platform is the Mitrion Virtual Processor (MVP) which runs software written in the Mitrion-C programming language on FPGAs and completely eliminates the need for the programmer to master hardware design. Together with the Mitrion Software Development Kit, the MVP offers a unique solution for developing supercomputing applications for FPGAs on a true software level. This dramatically reduces the total development costs for FPGA-based software acceleration, and more importantly, enables the whole supercomputing industry to benefit from FPGA application acceleration.