ico Computing addresses the foremost challenges associated with the real-time processing of big, streaming data: time and money. By solving the big data compute problems—including those at the extreme edge of the network—processes that used to take hours are reduced to seconds; what used to require thousands of expensive servers is accomplished often in a single, low-power, low-cost rack space, enabling the creation of new and highly differentiated business value, as well as the rare insights that produce real innovation.
The era of big and ubiquitous data brings not only new challenges, but unprecedented opportunities. The secret to competitive success in the new era lies in knowing how to exploit those opportunities, to unlock the prized answers hiding in all that data—and do it instantly and at low cost. To these ends, Pico Computing’s technologies enable breakthrough applications and business models that were previously impossible or simply unimagined.
What We Do
Pico Computing solutions enable enterprises to solve previously insurmount-able problems, and in the process, rethink their business models with new op-portunities to substantially lower operating costs, increase profitability, and even create new markets.
Whether targeted to HPC or embedded applications, Pico Computing’s modu-lar and highly-scalable architecture, based on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies, brings orders-of-magnitude performance gains, greatly reduced energy costs, the industry’s smallest form factor, and simplified
ap-We’re knocking down
the technology
barriers
to
high-performance
computing so
you can move your enterprise
forward
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Our modular, highly scalable FPGA-based HPC and embedded systems solve the biggest of the
big data computing challenges—from the edge to the data center to the desktop. Whatever
your hardware acceleration needs, we make it work, we make it scale, we make it easy.
P
“
Pico Computing’s
technologies enable
breakthrough
appli-cations and
busi-ness models that
were previously
impossible or
sim-ply unimagined.
plication design. Equally important, we make accelerated computing technology easy to use.
Our customers’ accelerated computing applications span cryptography to bioinformatics; image pro-cessing to networking; scientific computing and simulation to signal propro-cessing; persistent consumer apps to making the “Internet of Things” real, and more.
Information is power and time is money. If these are the fuels that drive business, then Pico Computing is the accelerant.
How We Do It
To increase business bandwidth, you’ve got to increase your computing bandwidth. That means elimi-nating the data bottlenecks. Pico Computing accomplishes this through a patents-pending combination of technologies that leverage the previously untapped power of the PCI Express bus, and a flexible system architecture that grows easily with your needs.
The mating of Pico Computing’s unique, modular, and reconfigurable FPGA-based solutions with a powerful development framework means you can go from proof of concept to production with virtually no intermediate steps. But this is only one way we help organizations save time and money:
On the engineering front, we eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel. By providing the complete high performance computing engine and the application development framework, organizations can deploy their engineering resources far more efficiently, and in ways that allow them to design production-ready features faster. On the operations front, we eliminate the unproductive time that adds up to years of man hours your analysts are spending waiting on serv-ers to crunch numbserv-ers. On the marketing and business development
fronts, it means being well positioned to exploit narrow market windows with timely, valuable data and product capabilities that will enable you to outperform your competitors. Simply put, Pico Computing solutions slash direct costs, eliminate many indirect costs, and recover opportunity costs so that your organization can operate—and innovate—more efficiently, securely, and profitably.
Pico Computing solutions find their sweet spot in myriad applications where the most aggressive de-mands for high performance, form factor, scalability, power, and cost all come together. And yet, while
Modular components and
scalable solutions yield
powerful, flexible, and
future-proof HPC systems.
Pico Computing technology is at work enabling advanced research, improving national security, and driving numerous, esoteric, leading edge applications, our solutions are also quite mainstream, making possible whole new classes of data-driven consumer apps.
For many markets and applications—particularly those involving real-time decision making in the context of massive volumes of continuously-stream-ing data—the ability to simply keep up will determine your ability to sur-vive in your market. The performance levels enabled by Pico Computing solutions—combined with their inherent cost effectiveness—make this, and
more, possible.
The Technology
•
Unmatched
Compute Density
Compute density, of course, goes hand in hand with form factor. The Pico Computing architecture allows more
computing per square inch (and with less power con-sumption) than any other alternative. This is due to the combination of large-scale FPGAs and an approach to system design that includes not just one or two, but many FPGAs per PCIe board, yielding an unmatched level of logic density per unit of rack space. Moreover, our patents-pending technology exploits the full bandwidth of the PCIe bus, enabling even greater performance within a very small form factor.
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Industry-leading FPGA Expertise
Because engineering organizations tend to specialize around a par-ticular FPGA vendor’s design environment and tool flow, Pico Com-puting is FPGA vendor- and design flow-agnostic, providing options for either Xilinx or Altera-based modules. In either case, the Pico Computing solution presents the same PCIe board interface,
back-plane, and API for a seamless integration experience. Pico Computing is also among the first to adopt OpenCL™, the parallel programming framework that compiles C code to CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other devices.
“
Pico Computing
solutions slash
direct costs,
eliminate many
indirect costs, and
recover opportunity
costs so that your
organization can
operate—and
innovate—more
efficiently, securely,
and profitably.
”
Unparalleled logic density yields
small, low cost, low power footprint.
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Pico Computing supports all FPGA
design flows—including OpenCL.
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A Fully Featured Design Framework
Unlike other solution providers, Pico Computing doesn’t leave engineers stranded with the hardware, leaving it to them to “figure it out.” Our software framework and firmware solutions complement and complete the solution, making easy work of system design and integration so that you can get to a working system quickly and without grief. In short, Pico Computing’s unique approach can save you many thousands of dollars in development effort, yielding the lowest total cost of ownership—and a much better HPC design experience in the bargain.
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Truly High Performance
Pico Computing is the only provider of HPC solutions that fully comprehends the meaning of high performance. Here’s just one proof point: All other so-lution providers present a significant bottleneck to system performance in the way they use the PCIe bus to access the computing modules, limiting throughput with x4 or x8 schemes—and with just one FPGA per PCIe slot (and slots are not cheap)! Pico Computing, on the other hand, provides a x16 PCIe from the host and a x8 PCIe to every module, which allows the host to directly address the many
FPGAs on the board (up to six per board—and up to 48-chip clusters in a chas-sis), with a potentially different data operation run-ning on each of them concurrently, and passing data between the FPGAs without host involvement.
In other words, we’ve eliminated the traffic cop, in-creased compute power by orders of magnitude, and enabled a level of parallel processing and compute speed never before realized in a PCIe environment. What’s more, Pico Computing is the first to market with PCIe Gen 3-compliant module, again taking the lead in FPGA-based high performance computing.
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Scalability
Whether your computing requirements are satisfied with a single module or many—right now or lat-er—flexibility will prove essential. Pico Computing solutions are truly plug-and-play, making system expansion as simple as plugging additional modules into the backplane. Startup projects in particular shouldn’t have to pay the budget penalties imposed by other solution providers whose systems are
“
Pico Computing’s
unique approach
can save you many
thousands of dollars
in development
effort, yielding the
lowest total cost
of ownership—and
a much better HPC
design experience in
the bargain.
”
Populate a single chassis with as
many as 48 FPGAs to support
mas-sively parallel computing operations
large, expensive, and do not scale. Moreover, with Pico Com-puting, our modular approach won’t limit your efficiencies as you grow. When your application and bandwidth requirements reach an appropriate cost/performance tradeoff threshold, we can convert the system to a more integrated solution; with our full customization, application, and engineering services, you can put Pico Computing’s HPC and embedded systems ex-pertise to work for you.
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System Design
Because Pico Computing brings a true system design
orienta-tion to our soluorienta-tions, we provide maximum system design flexibility. Whether you plan to use our mod-ules in a complex HPC system, or in an embedded application, we provide all the hardware, software,
and firmware you’ll need to bring your ap-plication to high performance fruition, with everything you’ll need for system design and rapid prototype development. And once your design is complete, you can put the result right into production. It really is that easy.
