Aldec and High-Performance Computing

Aldec continues to claim a bigger seat at the table, most recently in their attendance at SC17, the supercomputing conference hosted last month in Denver. I’m really not sure how to categorize Aldec now. EDA company seems to miss the mark by a wide margin. Prototyping company? Perhaps, though they have a much stronger focus on end-applications than a general-purpose prototyping solution, witness also recent attendance at the Trading Show in Chicago this year, where they were showing off platforms to support high-frequency trading (HFT).

In at least some of these applications it isn’t even clear that the Aldec solution is limited to prototyping. In low-volume applications (for example HFT), the Aldec boards may well be the final implementation. This is certainly apparent in some of the solutions they talked about at SC17: a DES code-breaker, a ViBe motion detector and a solution for short reads alignment in genome sequencing, as close to live applications as you can get.

Starting with the DES code breaker, I’m sure Aldec isn’t planning to enable hackers, also DES is no longer considered a secure encryption standard. However, this demo is a good example of using Aldec boards to build accelerators. In this demo, they show off a brute-force code-breaker to crack 6144 56-bit DES instances in ~20 hours using their HES-HPC accelerator with 6 Xilinx UltraScale chips. That’s a pretty powerful demonstration of the level of computation that is possible in an FPGA-based accelerator.

A more directly applicable demo shows off ViBe-based motion detection. ViBe is a popular method to detect and subtract background in video sequences, making it especially important in detecting moving objects in video, for example other cars or pedestrians. In this example, they are processing 1080p video at 39 frames per second and using the same HES-HPC platform to run ViBe background subtraction in real-time. This would naturally be useful in ADAS and autonomous driving applications and would be equally useful in security/surveillance applications and autonomous drone applications as just a few examples.

Their third demo is one of the coolest uses of an accelerator I have seen, to accelerate gene sequencing. As I understand it, today sequencing a whole genome in one shot is still a challenging (and expensive) problem. Sequencing methods more widely available for production applications tend to do something called short reads, reading a small set (a few hundred base-pairs) at a time (base pairs being pairs of the famous nucleotides A, C, G and T). These must then be mapped to a reference genome through a process of approximate string matching. This way the sequencer flow can build up a reconstruction of the actual genome sequence.

Of course, there are several challenges in this task. First, human DNA (as an immediately interesting application) has about 3 billion base pairs. Second you don’t expect an exact match to the reference genome. Mutations of various kinds are part of what makes us different and are a contributor to many ailments. There are also repeats/ redundancies in the genome. Matching has to take account of all of these potential differences. But at the same time, it has to be super-accurate. Human genomes are 99.9% similar across all types of humans so there’s really very little room for error.

ReneLife, a faculty enterprise of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, has developed a solution (ReneGene) to sequencing short reads that is faster, more accurate and significantly more cost effective than existing solutions and they have done so building on an HES-HPC platform. They compare an earlier software version of their solution with existing solutions and show it is more accurate and faster when running on a supercomputer cluster supported by a GPU cluster. OK, but hardly scalable to mass usage (at an estimated cost of $400k/year). Then they ported their solution to an HES-HPC implementation, running at an annual cost of less than 1% of the supercomputing solution, and it runs faster still. That sounds like a very compelling option for mass-market deployment.

I have to believe there are many more applications that could benefit from massive acceleration, for which the economics of an ASIC solution (and the skill-sets required) don’t make sense. FPGAs are a perfect fit in this cases and ready-made accelerator boards are even better (qv Raspberry Pi, Adafruit, etc.). Aldec seems to align very well with these needs. Perhaps we should call their products application-specific accelerator platforms. ASAP – not bad and certainly closer than EDA to the mission that is apparent in their trade-show and customer footprint.