Bellevue, WA – November 9, 2010 – Impulse Accelerated Technologies today announced that the Impulse C-to-FPGA compiler will be extended to support Convey’s HC-1 hybrid-core server. The companies are collaborating to integrate the Impulse compiler into the Convey Personality Development Kit (PDK), allowing C-language algorithms to be deployed as FPGA hardware accelerators in high-performance computing applications.
The Impulse compiler tools support automatic pipeline generation, instruction scheduling and other optimizations for increased algorithm throughput. The integration will combine Impulse compiler-generated hardware kernel functions with Convey’s proprietary shared memory accelerator architecture. Target applications include bioinformatics, financial computing, image processing and others.
Impulse C is the most widely used high level synthesis method of moving software applications to FPGA coprocessors. Research at the University of Washington benchmarked a 30% reduction in development time in designing in C rather than VHDL. More significantly, the team benchmarked a 80% reduction in iteration time.
“The Convey system offers seamless hardware/software programming and a large array of logic resources.” said Brian Durwood, CEO and co-founder of Impulse. He continued, “Impulse C treats the software and hardware processors as just PE1 and PE2, enabling software developers to partition logic between them with just a line of code. And for the remarkable amount of programmable logic resources Convey offers, Impulse C simply generates logic up to ten times quicker than hand coding.”
The Impulse compiler supports automated and user-directed parallel optimizations, resulting in faster processing speeds and lower power consumption. The Impulse C compiler generates hardware in standard formats, allowing the hardware code to be simulated and mapped to Convey hardware personalities with minimal effort.
“We are very excited to work with Impulse because their tools provide our hybrid-core customers with the boost in productivity needed to quickly develop new personalities or instruction sets. Our partnership will help customers innovate on hybrid-core platforms and accelerate applications in a wide variety of industries,” said Bruce Toal, CEO and co-founder, Convey Computer.
About Impulse
Founded in 2002, Impulse Accelerated Technologies provides C-to-FPGA tools enabling developers to quickly offload processing logic to FPGA. Impulse also provides training and custom solutions. Impulse C has been used to design vision systems, financial feed handlers, and database grid accelerators. Impulse C is used by most federal agencies, most major car manufacturers, Wall St. banks, Japanese imaging companies, most top government contractors, and hundreds of R&D labs worldwide. www.ImpulseAccelerated.com
About Convey Computer Corporation
Based in Richardson, Texas, Convey Computer breaks power, performance and programmability barriers with the world’s first hybrid-core computer—a system that marries the low cost and simple programming model of a commodity system with the performance of a customized hardware architecture.
