Pico Computing Powers HPC Accelerator Board with Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGAs

Seattle, WA – November 2, 2009 – Pico Computing today announced that it has powered up and tested its soon-to-be-released EX-500 PCI Express accelerator board with two M-501 FPGA modules, and has successfully deployed a bioinformatics search algorithm on the new system.

The new, modular FPGA acceleration platform supports up to six M-501 modules per PCI Express board. Each module can be configured with a range of FPGAs including the Xilinx Virtex®-6 LX240T devices used in the first test application.

“The M-501 modules with Virtex-6 FPGAs satisfy demands from our customers for increasing levels of computing performance, in applications that range from data Security to life sciences and financial modeling,” said Mark Hur, Director of Sales and Marketing for Pico Computing. “Our government and commercial customers depend on our ability to supply the most advanced acceleration solutions, using the most up-to-date FPGA technologies.”

“Pico Computing is demonstrating impressive technical leadership by creating a computing platform based on Xilinx’s high-performance Virtex-6 family,” added Xilinx Senior Director of Product Management Patrick Dorsey. “By creating a scalable, multiple-FPGA platform based on Virtex-6 LX240T FPGAs, Pico has shown that FPGAs represent a strong alternative to Multicore or GPU-based application acceleration.”

Within two days of powering up the first M-501 modules, Pico Computing engineers had successfully migrated and tested a bioinformatics searching algorithm and demonstrated significant improvements in algorithm speed and throughput over previous generation FPGA products.

According to Kelley Dobelstein, Senior hardware Engineer at Pico, “Using our new, modular EX-500 platform as the foundation, we were able to design, fabricate and deploy this new FPGA module very quickly in response to customer requests. We have once again demonstrated our ability to create the most advanced and scalable FPGA computing platforms.”

Pico Computing will demonstrate its EX-500 board and M-501 modules at the International Conference for High Performance Computing 2009 (SC09) November 14 - 20, 2009 in Portland, Oregon.

About Pico Computing

Pico Computing, headquartered in Seattle, Washington, specializes in highly integrated development and deployment platforms based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies. Applications for Pico Computing technologies include cryptography, networking, signal processing, bioinformatics, and scientific computing. Pico Computing products are used in embedded systems as well as in Military, national security and high performance computing applications. For more information about Pico products and services, visit www.picocomputing.com.

Editorial Contact

Mark Hur, Pico Computing

(206) 283-2178, mhur@picocomputing.com