6
The
Manufacturing Of State-of-the-Art Reconfigurable Board for Heterogeneous
Computing--Advanced
Principles Group, Inc., 28 Fieldstone Drive, Hooksett, NH
03106; 603-512-9003, www.advancedprinciples.com
Mr.
Joe G. Thompson, Principal Investigator,
Mr.
Joe G. Thompson, Business Official,
DOE
Grant No. DE-FG02-03ER83595
Amount:
$749,836
DOE Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation (NA) applications,
especially in the area of software radio, drive wide bandwidths and therefore
require high-density super-computing-class I/O, memory, and signal processing
capabilities. General-purpose
processors do not provide enough performance density to effectively address
these applications. The introduction
of super-computing boards based on (multi-purpose, reconfigurable)
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) could provide these extremely high
performance densities. However, the
effective implementation of applications in FPGA hardware is difficult.
In addition to the core computational processing, interface and support
cores will be required for effective data movement to memories, busses, and
networks, as well as to the system monitoring/management agent.
This project will manufacture an advanced Reconfigurable Computing board,
the Configurable Software Radio Board (CSRB), based on state-of-the-art Xilinx
Virtex II Pro FPGA technology. Phase
I developed the architecture and design for the CSRB. The
CSRB is capable of 1.5 - 2.5 TeraOps of computing power, 100 Gbps front panel
I/O, 4 Gbps backplane I/O, and hosts more than 4 GBytes of on-board memory.
System issues such as signal integrity, thermal management, high-current
power supplies, current in-rush control, testability, and maintainability were
addressed. In Phase II, four copies
of the CSRB will be manufactured, tested, and delivered.
Commercial
Applications and Other Benefits as
described by awardee: Sensor
signal processing applications, such as found in security surveillance, medical,
and target recognition systems, should greatly benefit from the proposed
high-density compute board. Target
markets include government agencies (specifically DOE), defense labs, defense
contractors, telecom companies, wireless telecom companies, and semiconductor
companies.