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HPC Hardware and VLSI

Goal of CRL Hardware team is to design special purpose hardware to enhance the performance of certain HPC applications.

CRL hardware team is a neat mix of highly motivated young as well as experienced engineers ready to explore new ways of solving technological challenges.

Hardware Group Activities

CRL is designing the hardware accelerators for the most compute intensive science and engineering applications. These accelerators have been designed and implemented using the standard commercial off-the-shelf FPGA’s.

FPGAs are a good choice for reconfigurable computing due to their flexible architecture, pipeline ability and availability. The algorithms can be programmed using high level languages such as C and re-programmed multiple times to optimize the algorithm and system implementation.

The boards are designed for PCI Express form factor and they will interface to the HPC cluster through the high speed multi lane PCI Express.

Application Focus

The target applications currently are Cryptography, libraries for crypt analysis and Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Crypto algorithms which involve long integer arithmetic will have significant benefits by such dedicated hardware. A 40% performance improvement is expected over standard processors.

FPGA based acceleration overcomes floating point and integer operations and hence becomes advantageous for CFD applications too.

CRL has a highly experienced hardware design team with good experience in high speed board designs, multi-layered, multi-CPU and high performance board designs. Hardware team is planning to carry out system/board level designs for High Speed Interconnects. CRL has a capability to implement complete board design flow - from schematic to final Gerber release to suit different manufacturing requirements.