Maxwell supercomputer comes down on Xeon's head

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH has unveiled a supercomputer called Maxwell which uses 10 times less power than conventional systems but provides more bang for your buck.

The system uses field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) instead of ordinary CPUs and was constructed by the FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance.

Compontents for Maxwell are designed by Scottish small and medium enterprises Nallatech and Alpha Data, using FPGAs made by Xilinx.

Three oil, financial and medical imaging applications have already been ported Maxwell's way, with the machine costing £3.6 million to build. Scottish Enterprise helped fund it.

THe system uses a 32-way IBM Blade Centre chassis including 64 Virtex-4 Xilinx FPGAs connected over the Rocket IO - a system which lets codes be parallelised across FPGAs. "This encourages algorithms to be written such that once the data and program are loaded onto the accelerator cards the processing occurs without data being transferred again across the PCI-X bus," said the boffins.

It's claimed that oil and gas simulations run over six times faster per node than a cluster of 3GHz Xeons, and three dimensional video frames can be processed over eight frames per second. The boffins did not make a comparison with the Intel Itanium nor the AMD Opteron, to the best of our knowledge.

Named after the creator of the first colour photo, James Clerk Maxwell, the boffins have a little McVideo of the system, here. µ