Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Hybrid-core computing services developer Convey Computer recently announced the release of its Wolverine family of coprocessors, designed to provide hardware acceleration for data intensive applications in the life sciences, big data, security, and other industries involved in high-performance computing (HPC).

Bruce Toal, chief executive officer at Convey, remarked, “Like our existing line of hybrid-core, reconfigurable coprocessors, Convey’s new Wolverine accelerator coupled with the latest x86 servers provides higher absolute performance and improved efficiency. Additionally, Wolverine’s easy to deploy form factor gives customers more options to address their application performance requirements. Because Wolverine is available in three deployment models, customers are now able to implement the innovative accelerator technology in a hardware configuration that best meets their needs.”

The Wolverine family of coprocessors is described by Convey as a powerful line of application accelerators that implement Convey’s Hybrid-Core accelerator architecture in a PCI (News - Alert) Express card form factor, reducing power and rack space requirements while delivering dramatic performance gains.

The latest high density Xilinx (News - Alert) Virtex7 field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) integrated into these new coprocessors ensure that better performance per watt is provided while lowering power and heat requirements. In addition, the standard PCI Express form factor means the accelerator can be quickly deployed on industry-standard servers.

The Wolverine coprocessor blends the performance and power savings of FPGAs with the programmability and standardization of an off-the-shelf server. It is available to users in three variants: a cost-effective, lower gate count version, a high-performance single-card version, and a high-performance dual-card version.

Convey also unveiled its next generation hybrid-core server, the WX Series, which offers application-specific performance for HPC and data intensive applications. It combines an industry standard server with a Wolverine coprocessor to dramatically accelerate applications.

Toal said, “The Wolverine technology is an ideal way of deploying application-specific acceleration within industry-standard servers to minimize power and space requirements. Our goal is to collaborate with OEM manufacturers to deliver highly accelerated solutions.”