In July of 2009, a new supercomputer named Novo-G was deployed at CHREC, the most powerful machine ever constructed for research in reconfigurable computing. The size, cost, cooling, and power consumption of Novo-G are modest by HPC standards, but they hide its computational superiority. For example, in the first application experiment conducted with domain scientists in computational biology, performance was sustained with 96 FPGAs matching one of the largest machines on the NSF TeraGrid, yet achieved by a machine hundreds of times lower in cost, power, cooling, size, etc. Such is the advantage of reconfiguring the architecture to match the application. Novo-G is currently undergoing upgrade to increase RC capacity to 192 top-end FPGAs and RAM capacity to nearly 1 TB (more than 800 GB of it attached directly to FPGAs). For the genomics and proteomics sequencing application cited above (and others expected in future), Novo-G will be one of the fastest computers of any kind in the known world (all others being alarmingly massive, expensive, and power-hungry!).
Housed in three racks, Novo-G consists of 24 standard Linux servers (plus a head node) connected by DDR InfiniBand and GigE. Each server features a tightly coupled set of four FPGA accelerators in each of two ProcStar-III PCIe boards from GiDEL, supported by a conventional quad-core CPU, motherboard, disk, etc. Each of the 192 FPGAs is a Stratix-III E260 device from Altera with 254K logic elements, 768 18x18 multipliers, and 4.25 GB of DDR2 memory directly attached via three banks.