MitrionTM SDK by MitionicsTM

Faster, Better FPGA Programming for your SGI® RASC™ RC100 Blade!

SGI presents the Mitrion™ Software Development Kit (Mitrion SDK), created by Mitrionics™, Inc., an SGI partner.

The Mitrion SDK is a development environment supporting Mitrion-C, a language targeted towards crafting highly parallel algorithms and computational processes for use on programmable hardware platforms such as FPGAs. Mitrion-C syntax is very similar to ANSI-C; this makes it easy for engineers to get up to speed quickly and to port C code into Mitrion-C without facing a complete rewrite.

The Mitrion SDK includes Mitrion-C libraries, Mitrion Virtual Processor architecture, and a Mitrion-C compiler for generating VHDL. SGI offers the Mitrion SDK alone or, under the name Mitrion SDK XL, bundled with the Xilinx ISE software required for final integration with the target FPGA. In addition, working open sourced applications are available such as NCBI BLAST-n with orders of magnitude performance increases vs. non accelerated solutions.

The Mitrion SDK has found application in solutions for bioinformatics, gene sequencing, , text search for managed security, and image processing.

How the Process Works

  1. An application or algorithm written in C is analyzed for bottlenecks
  2. The bottleneck segment is taken out of the main code and ported over to Mitrion-C
  3. The code is compiled for the Mitrion Virtual Processor, simulating an actual FPGA
  4. The Mitrion-C code is automatically converted to VHDL, a language that can interact with the FPGA
  5. Final translation into the bit-stream used to configure the FPGA chip is completed with Xilinx ISE™

The result is that the bottleneck process is separate from the main code and running in a highly parallel and optimized fashion across multiple FPGAs, linking the result data seamlessly back into the original application. Implementations have seen performance improvements from 10x to 60x using FPGA technology.

About Mitrionics
Mitrionics AB was founded in 2001 to commercialize the Mitrion Platform and a technology which enables FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) to be programmed easier and faster than ever before possible, thereby providing customers with revolutionary FPGA Supercomputing performance for data intensive applications in industries such as bioinformatics, finance and managed security. Mitrionics has key industry relationships with HPC System provider SGI and FPGA module suppliers DRC, Nallatech, and XtremeData.

Mitrionics is headquartered in Lund, Sweden, and Mitrionics, Inc. is its wholly-owned U.S. subsidiary with offices in Los Gatos, CA and Seattle, WA.

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