Alliance builds Maxwell Supercomputer

The Alliance has built a 64-processor FPGA supercomputer - Maxwell - using world leading FPGA technology designed and manufactured by Scottish SMEs (Nallatech and Alpha Data) utilising Virtex 4 FPGAs provided by the world's leading FPGA company (Xilinx).

To demonstrate the system's power and flexibility the Alliance has selected and ported three real-world industrial applications from the Oil & Gas, Medical and Finance sectors. Experience gained has repeatedly demonstrated the challenge of programmability of these novel computing devices.

The work of the Alliance is focused upon this challenge. If FPGAs can be made easy to programme, the Alliance believes that FPGA-based systems could usher in a new generation of compact and energy-saving supercomputers over the coming decade.

A 32-way IBM BladeCentre chassis hosts 64 Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs directly connected over high-speed RocketIO. Built by EPCC, Nallatech and Alpha Data, Maxwell explores massively- parallel FPGA processing for high-performance reconfigurable computing

Maxwell- The Alliance's 64-processor supercomputer
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