"The driver for agreements with these superior software companies is efficiency for our customers", stated Bruce Toal, CEO and president, Convey Computer Corporation. "By supporting Mitrionics' products on our hybrid-core computing systems, customers can develop and deploy custom personalities in a shorter time period. By using Platform Computing's premier scheduling software, customers can efficiently manage compute or data-intensive workloads on HPC clusters and Grids."

Mitrionics, an expert in FPGA-based software development products, will support its Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit on Convey's HC-1 hybrid-core computers. FPGA computing applications, championed by both Mitrionics and Convey, are attractive to HPC users because of the technology's lower power consumption, architectural flexibility, and increased application performance. Programmable "on the fly", yet still close enough to raw semiconductor gates, FPGAs represent an ideal way to get application-specific performance without the time and cost of developing a custom ASIC.

The Mitrionics–Convey products, featuring an accelerated Smith-Waterman algorithm, have been demonstrated at SC09.

"The Convey HC-1 system's large memories and superior memory bandwidth makes it particularly well suited for accelerating a number of modern bioinformatics algorithms", stated Stefan Möhl, chief science officer and co-founder of Mitrionics. "Our implementation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm for the HC-1 demonstrates the potential of the system and, with Mitrion, it will be easy to create custom personalities to accelerate other widely used applications."

Mitrionics products allow software developers to benefit from FPGA-based software acceleration, without having to deal with the complexities of hardware design. Convey designs hybrid-core computer systems that make extensive use of FPGAs to achieve dynamically loading personalities (application-specific instruction sets). However, unlike FPGA accelerators that are I/O based or non-coherently attached, the Convey HC-1 features cache-coherent, virtual memory to increase application performance and programmer productivity.

Beginning in December, Platform Computing and Convey Computer Corporation will partner to have Platform products supported on Convey's hybrid-core computers. Convey Computer Corporation will also resell Platform's industry leading high performance computing (HPC) products. By running Platform's HPC products, such as Platform Cluster Manager, Platform LSF and Platform Symphony, customers will now be able to combine the power of Convey's hybrid-core servers with the ability to manage and schedule workloads across cluster environments. As Convey's hybrid-core computing systems are deployed in cluster environments, the need to manage and schedule the systems in these environments becomes essential.