FPGAs accelerate servers at Texas Advanced Computing Centre

16th November 2015

Altera Europe

Jordan Mulcare

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Programmable logic technology from Altera Corporation is now in place inside a new, advanced server cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University Texas at Austin, which seeks to help researchers and academia to run complex algorithmic-based research. Microsoft Research shared more about the server cluster becoming available for research use at TACC, in a blog post.

Altera FPGAs are used as accelerators on the Microsoft Project Catapult board, and turn commodity servers into high-performance, power-efficient machines. Researchers are now invited to use TACC resources to run their software programmes and algorithms, associated with, but not limited to, deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNN), facial and object recognition, online search and even genomic research. TACC also offers free use of boards to students, professors and the community in its ongoing effort to provide access to world-class high performance computing systems.

“TACC’s 14-year history is impressive, and we are pleased Altera technology will be the latest asset in the center’s compute arsenal,” said Erhaan Shaikh, Vice President, Infrastructure Division, Altera Business Units. “By making these high-performance servers with our FPGAs inside available to researchers, we anticipate that much progress will be made in the fields of science, math, medicine and all areas requiring these powerful computations.”