New system boards for Matrox Supersight HPC platform now available

PR Log (Press Release) – Nov 03, 2009 – Stuttgart, Germany — At Vision 2009, Matrox Imaging is announcing two PICMG 1.3 boards for its high-performance computing (HPC) platform, Matrox Supersight e2. The new system host board (SHB-5520) and the x86 accelerator board (XAB-5520) support Intel’s latest-generation microarchitecture, Nehalem, through the use of the Intel 5520 chipset.

“The Nehalem microarchitecture features an all-new memory architecture coupled with QuickPath Interconnect (QPI),” explains Pierantonio Boriero, Product Line Manager, Matrox Imaging. “This is good news for demanding image processing applications like semiconductor wafer and mask inspection, flat panel display (FPD) inspection, and CT scanning.”

The Nehalem microarchitecture will bring performance gains to high-throughput machine vision and imaging applications whose data volumes continue to increase. Memory directly attached to the CPU offers higher bandwidth as a result of a shorter path, so traditionally I/O-bound operations (such as arithmetic and spatial filters with small kernels) enjoy higher performance. Intel® QPI, the basis of a distributed shared memory architecture, improves communication between multiple processors, encouraging parallelism, which translates into performance gains for compute-bound operations like morphology with large kernels as well as I/O-bound operations.

About Matrox Supersight e2
Matrox Supersight e2 is a high-performance computing platform designed for imaging applications with an extremely high throughput. Leveraging multiple clusters of CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, Matrox Supersight e2 provides an environment for considerable data and task-level parallel processing through a unique PCI Express® (PCIe®) x16 2.0 (Gen2) switch fabric.  Applications for Matrox Supersight e2 are developed with the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) and its Distributed MIL API. As MIL is supported on all Matrox Imaging hardware platforms, development on Matrox Supersight e2 is simplified and ensures the source code is portable across all devices, from nodes with 32 CPU cores and 4 FPGAs, to a node with 8 CPU cores, 1 FPGA and 6 GPUs and everything in between.    

Matrox Supersight e2 SHB-5520 / XAB-5520 will be available in Q4 2009.