Mitrionics' FPGA Supercomputing Platform Taught at McGill University for Custom HPC Architecture Course

Market Wire, December, 2006

Mitrionics(TM), Inc., developer of the Mitrion(TM) Virtual Processor and software-centric Mitrion-C programming language for FPGA Supercomputing acceleration, today announced that its Mitrion Platform has been used during the fall 2006 semester at McGill University to teach graduate level students parallel programming techniques for application acceleration utilizing FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). The course, titled "Custom High Performance Computing Architectures," is being taught by Professor Warren Gross of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and utilizes the Mitrion-C programming language to teach its students. About fifty percent of the course is based on learning and utilizing the Mitrion Platform and students are required to successfully write and demonstrate an FPGA-accelerated application at the end of the semester.

To increase accessibility of its FPGA Supercomputing development platform and accelerate application development, Mitrionics recently announced the availability of a new Mitrion Software Development Kit -- Personal Edition (SDK-PE) at no charge from www.mitrionics.com . This makes it is easy for academic institutions, professors and students to download the SDK and get started with their development work. The Mitrion Platform is the leading technology for FPGA Supercomputing application acceleration and is used by many of the world's most prominent government and academic institutions involved in supercomputing.

"As our Mitrion Platform continues to gain broad industry acceptance and adoption, it is especially exciting to see students from the prestigious McGill University utilize our Mitrion-C language as part of their engineering coursework," stated Anders Dellson, CEO of Mitrionics, Inc. "This marks an important step in the growth and evolution of FPGA-accelerated applications and we look forward to seeing the results of this new generation of developers."

"The Mitrion Platform and Mitrion-C programming language is well suited for teaching how to develop accelerated applications because it is very software centric," said Warren Gross, Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University. "The graduate students in the class were able to successfully develop an accelerated application as part of their course grade."

About FPGA Supercomputing

FPGA Supercomputing is an exciting and growing market segment based on technology that enables processor performance acceleration 10x to 100x greater than traditional processors. Scientists, developers, and researchers strive to improve productivity by achieving faster performance in their supercomputing applications and lower power consumption in their systems. The software-centric Mitrion Platform is ideal for software developers, scientists, and researchers because it allows FPGA Supercomputing applications to be developed without any hardware circuit design skills. Key application areas that stand to benefit most from FPGA Supercomputing are bioinformatics, oil and gas, imaging, and financial industries.

About McGill University

Located in Montreal and founded in 1821, McGill University is one of Canada's best-known institutions of higher learning and the country's leading research-intensive University. With more than 32,000 students coming to McGill from about 140 countries, its student body is the most internationally diverse of any medical-doctoral university in Canada. In addition to a stellar faculty, McGill is known for attracting the brightest students from across Canada, the United States, and abroad. McGill students have the highest average entering grades in Canada, and its commitment to fostering the best has helped students win more national and international awards on average than their peers at any other Canadian university. The prestigious Rhodes Scholarship has gone to a nation-leading 126 McGill students. More information is available at: www.mcgill.ca .

About the Mitrion Platform and Mitrion Virtual Processor

The fine-grained, massively parallel Mitrion Virtual Processor is the core of the Mitrion Platform. It runs software written in the Mitrion-C programming language in FPGAs. This completely eliminates the need for the programmer to master hardware design. The Mitrion Virtual Processor has a unique architecture that lets it be adapted to each program it is running in order to maximize performance. Together with the Mitrion Software Development Kit, it offers a unique solution for developing supercomputing applications for FPGAs on a true software level. It combines the performance of dedicated hardware with the programmability of parallel processors. This dramatically reduces the total development costs for FPGA-based software acceleration, and more importantly, enables the whole supercomputing industry to benefit from FPGA application acceleration.

About Mitrionics

Founded in 2001, Mitrionics, Inc. is the technology leader in the exciting new field of FPGA Supercomputing which provides higher processing power and lower energy consumption than clusters of computer systems. The company's Mitrion Virtual Processor and Mitrion Software Development Kit provide cost effective FPGA Supercomputing power to organizations for their most critical applications. The Mitrion Platform is unique from any other FPGA programming solution, because it eliminates the need for circuit design skills, thus making FPGA Supercomputing performance accessible to an entire new market of scientists and developers. Mitrionics has key industry relationships with Cray, Nallatech, and Silicon Graphics. For more information, visit the company Web site at www.mitrionics.com , or call 310-558-9495, or email: info@mitrionics.com .