Based at IDT's facility in Ottawa, Canada, the Open HPAC Lab runs on a contribution model. It has been seeded by IDT and partner companies to enable end users to develop application software for analytics and high-performance computing requiring a variety of processor types with low latency, high throughput and energy efficiency. Target applications for the lab workload include real-time analytics, deep learning, pattern recognition, video analytics and image processing.
"As analytics of large amounts of unstructured data become more important in the hyperscale cloud data centre, the need for using accelerators such as GPUs and FPGAs in conjunction with processors is paramount, and low-latency interconnect is key to keeping up with the workload in distributed multi-processor systems," said Sailesh Chittipeddi, IDT's chief technology officer and vice president of Global Operations. "We kicked off the Open HPAC Lab to provide an area of collaboration for those requiring the low latency and energy efficiency that RapidIO interconnect delivers."
The technology at the centre of the lab was used for analysing the content of Twitter traffic during the 2014 FIFA World Cup Finals, and was recently adopted by CERN for its Large Hadron Collider and data centre analytics. The lab is based on industry-standard IT form factor solutions that align with the Open Compute Project HPC initiative, which IDT co-chairs.
