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Design and Development Software
News Release from: Mitrionics | Subject: Mitrion Software Development Kit
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 24 April 2008
Software kit provides processing boost
The Mitrion SDK includes new programming examples written in Mitrion-C and revised documentation, making it easier to start writing FPGA-accelerated applications.
Mitrionics has released the Mitrion Software Development Kit (SDK), which includes significant improvements to the Mitrion Virtual Processor (MVP), enabling a a faster and more efficient synthesis/place and route process The SDK also includes new programming examples written in Mitrion-C and revised documentation, making it easier to start writing FPGA-accelerated applications
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 14 Oct 2005 at 8.00am (UK)
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Platform promises FPGA-based supercomputing
The revolutionary new Mitrion platform makes supercomputing performance accessible to a broader market of scientists, researchers and software developers.
Dev kit gets FPGA designs right before synthesis
New diagnostics and optimisation features allow users to shorten development times by troubleshooting, debugging and optimising Mitrion processor designs before FPGA synthesis.
Students, professors and developers can access these new improvements to the SDK free of charge, by downloading the Mitrion SKD PE from the company's website.
Mitrion-accelerated applications running on the Mitrion Virtual Processor provide performance up to 60 times greater than traditional processors while using 90% less power than traditional system clusters.
Accelerated applications can benefit the financial, imaging, seismology and encryption industries, as well as bioinformatics, cheminformatics, molecular modeling and genomics.
Further reading
Supercomputing platform upgrades to latest FPGAs
The Mitrion Platform, consisting of the Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit, now fully supports Xilinx Virtex-4 Platform FPGAs.
Platform supports Silicon Graphics blade
The Mitrion Platform now supports the new SGI RASC RC100 computation blade, built with dual Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs.
FPGA supercomputing on the curriculum
The Mitrion Platform has been used during the fall 2006 semester at McGill University to teach graduate level students parallel programming techniques for application acceleration using FPGAs.
Mitrionics has developed an accelerated version of the NCBI Blast bioinformatics application and has made it available to the industry as an open source application.
"Acceleration technologies, platforms and products are being accepted into the mainstream by global industry leaders like Intel, AMD, Xilinx, SGI, Cray and others", said Mike Calise, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Mitrionics.
"Parallel programming is a main component for all accelerated computing and shortage of software developers with parallel programming knowledge is about to become a bottleneck".
"By offering our free hardware independent Mitrion SDK PE to academic institutions world wide we hope to bridge this gap".
"We taught parallel programming using the Mitrion Platform during the past two fall semesters as part of our graduate-level coursework", said Warren Gross, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University.
"The Mitrion-C programming language is well suited for teaching because it is very software-centric and the students were able to successfully develop an accelerated application as part of their course grade".
The Mitrion Software Development Kit Personal Edition is a free version of the Mitrion SDK that allows the development of accelerated applications for the Mitrion Virtual Processor without access to FPGA hardware.
The Mitrion SDK PE includes a Mitrion-C compiler and a graphical debugger and is a complete development environment for accelerating applications.
The Mitrion SDK PE does not include the capability to generate Mitrion Virtual Processors that will run in FPGA hardware.
To do this, the Mitrion SDK commercial version is required.
The Mitrion SDK PE provides the ability to write and debug Mitrion-C applications for the Mitrion Virtual Processor, simulate their interaction with programs running on the host CPU and determine their actual performance on different FPGA platforms.
The Mitrion-C programming language is an implicitly parallel programming language with syntax very similar to C.
With Mitrion-C it is easy for programmers to learn how to write software that takes advantage of all the parallelism available from the Mitrion Virtual Processor.
The Mitrion Debugger is a graphical debugger and code simulator.
It simplifies finding programming errors, performance bottlenecks and inefficient code.
The Mitrion SDK PE is supported on Linux/Unix, Windows and Mac OS X.
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