TACC Makes Microsoft Project Catapult Servers Available to Academic Researchers
The Texas Advanced Computing
Center (TACC) at The University of Texas
at Austin is offering researchers the opportunity to access Microsoft's
Project Catapult clusters for science and engineering research projects.
Originally developed as an experiment to improve the speed and efficiency of Microsoft's Bing search service, Project
Catapult uses standard Microsoft datacenter servers that have been
augmented with an Altera field programmable gate array (FPGA). According to
information from Microsoft, FPGAs offer numerous benefits: The functionality of
FPGA gates can be changed on the fly, providing "programmable logic that can be
tailored to individual applications," unlike standard chips, which have
permanently etched gates. The FPGAs also offer significantly accelerated
performance and reduced power consumption.
TACC is home to the first Project Catapult cluster outside of Microsoft. It
consists of 432 two-socket nodes, each of which features two Intel Xeon E5-2450
processors, 64 gigabytes of RAM and an Altera Stratix V FPGA with 8 gigabytes
of local DDR3 RAM. Microsoft is deploying the system in collaboration with TACC
with the goal of investigating "the use of FPGAs as computational accelerators
to improve application performance, reduce power consumption and open new
avenues of investigation for researchers," stated a news release from TACC.
"As one of the largest providers of advanced computing systems for open
data- and compute-intensive science in the US, TACC serves as a bridge between
the computing community and researchers in engineering and science," said Bill
Barth, director of TACC's High Performance Computing group, in a prepared
statement. "The open research community doesn't have a large, publicly
available FPGA system, so this will be quite exciting for both the scientists
and engineers and the FPGA research computing communities."
Researchers interested in accessing the Catapult system are invited to
submit a proposal for consideration by TACC and Microsoft. Further information
about the Project Catapult system is available on TACC's
site.
About the Author
Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].