Technology

Tightly integrated technology ensures ease of use and deployment

Convey's revolutionary hybrid-core solution tightly integrates advanced computer architecture and compiler technology with commercial, off-the-shelf hardware—namely Intel^© Xeon^© processors and Xilinx^© Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The HC-1 and HC-1^ex dramatically increase performance, yet are simple to program and easy to deploy.

In the past, attempts to leverage multi-core processors or asymmetric hardware-based solutions have been difficult to integrate and deploy, often requiring the use of multiple software toolsets or by rewriting of applications. Not so with the Convey hybrid-core platforms.

The world's first hybrid-core computers, the Convey HC-1 and HC-1^ex, employ a reconfigurable coprocessor that augments the capabilities of a commodity processor with processing elements optimized for performance-critical operations. Instructions executed by the coprocessor appear as extensions to the x86 instruction set, giving you the performance of application-specific hardware with the programmability and deployment ease of an x86 server. Applications can contain both x86 and coprocessor instructions in a single instruction stream—providing a flexible approach to optimizing different kinds of applications.

Unlike other heterogeneous or asymmetric architectures, the processors share a coherent virtual address space, making the system appear as a single processor with multiple application-specific cores. The cache-coherent shared view of memory eliminates the need for intrusive application modifications and exotic programming languages or dialects.

 

 

Convey Computer Corporation: The leader in hybrid-core computing