Samplify announces APAX acceleration for multi-core apps

SANTA CLARA, USA: Samplify Systems Inc. announced APAX application acceleration technology which improves the performance of multi-core processors.

Samplify's APAX technology scales up to accommodate installations as large as supercomputing and cloud data centers, and scales down for seamless integration into application processors used in smart phones and mobile devices. Samplify will deliver APAX as both software for high-performance computing (HPC), and as intellectual property for SoCs and new FPGA families with embedded processors.

"With Moore's law, the raw performance of multi-core processors doubles with each new process geometry," says Al Wegener, founder and CTO of Samplify Systems. "However, the sustained performance of these multi-core processors reaches only a fraction of their potential because of memory and I/O bandwidth constraints. For the first time, we are offering a technology that can reduce the bandwidth requirements in a multitude of memory-bound numerical, graphical, and imaging applications."

High-performance computing is characterized by the application of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of compute cores to solve a single problem. Examples of such applications include weather forecasting and climate modeling, seismic exploration, vehicle simulation, financial modeling, scientific visualization, genomics and drug discovery.

The limiting factor in sustaining the performance of these applications is the distribution of data sets and sharing of intermediate results among the cores. Samplify's APAX accelerates HPC applications by speeding the distribution of numerical data (both integer-valued and floating point-valued), as well as graphics and images.

APAX can be deployed as software running on Intel x84/x64 CPUs or on graphics processing units (GPUs) from NVIDIA and ATI. APAX can also accelerate memory subsystems, storage subsystems, I/O, and network interfaces by integrating it as hardware IP into the memory controller, storage controller, Southbridge, and network interface card, respectively.

Multi-core processing has now migrated to consumer electronics and mobile devices such as tablets and smart phones. The integration of multi-core processors, along with GPUs and video codecs, into application processors creates similar memory and I/O bottlenecks experienced in HPC applications. Samplify's APAX technology, integrated as a hardware IP block onto the application processor, accelerates application performance on multi-core processors while simultaneously improving graphics performance and video playback.