Accelerator technologies include specialized processors, graphics engines and other devices that increase the speed of critical functions within an application. When used as part of an overall HPC solution from SGI, these technologies have been shown to improve performance by orders of magnitude - and at significantly less cost than traditional system scale-outs.

Through the SGI Accelerator Enabling Programme, ISVs and customers will have access to dozens of accelerator technology experts from SGI and participating companies. By collaborating with these experts, developers and customers can optimize their codes to run on the accelerator that best suits the needs of their applications.

The programme extends a long-established commitment from SGI to support accelerator technologies in its HPC platforms. Starting with its first graphics systems in 1984, SGI has incorporated numerous leading-edge accelerator options in its system, including its SGI Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing (RASC) RC100 Technology for SGI Altix systems.

"SGI customers in the sciences have seen enormous benefit from accelerating key applications, including BLAST-n, with SGI RASC Technology. With this new programme, we're broadening those benefits to more applications and disciplines with a wider range of accelerator technologies", stated Bill Mannel, senior director of server marketing, SGI, who will deliver a presentation on the new initiative June 20 at ISC. "The SGI Accelerator Enabling Programme brings together trusted experts and ISVs to provide customers with the best accelerators for their SGI platform and their specific application."

The SGI Accelerator Enabling Program incorporates a range of technologies to extract maximum performance from bioinformatics, computational chemistry, weather and climate modelling, astrophysics, and other scientific applications. Among them:

• NVIDIA parallel visual computing on NVIDIA professional GPU (graphics processing unit) solutions
• PACT XPP digital signal processors for 2D edge detection used in biomedical imaging, pattern recognition and searches
• ClearSpeed Technology acceleration solutions for molecular dynamics, drug design, computational chemistry, electromagnetics and turbulent fluid flow analysis
• XtremeData for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerator options beyond the SGI RASC RC100 to optimize scientific computing and medical imaging

"Domain knowledge is absolutely critical when designing a solution that delivers on the promise of application-specific acceleration, and the SGI Accelerator Enabling Programme gives ISVs and customers the chance to collaborate with experts who have that knowledge", stated Geno Valente, vice president, sales and marketing, XtremeData Inc. "XtremeData is proud to participate in this initiative, which reflects our own commitment to finding new and inventive ways to use XtremeData technologies to achieve breakthroughs in the sciences."