Pico Computing Hits The Accelerator For Clusters

Company:

Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.

Technology Sector: Hardware

Key Product: Pico FPGA Computing Clusters

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 6 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-Focused Solution Provider

Why You Should Care: Pico Computing is a technology leader in the growing hardware-accelerated computing industry, serving customers in defense and security, life sciences and high-performance reconfigurable computing.

The Lowdown: Up in the rainy Pacific Northwest, Pico Computing is working with a stable of worldwide channel partners to deliver high-performance computing (HPC) solutions based on the vendor's Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies.

"In the last six months, we've signed new partners throughout Europe and Asia who are truly value-added resellers. These are partners who supply design tools and compiler tools, as well as system integrators selling into oil and gas, or areas like genomics and cartography," said David Pellerin, director of marketing at Pico Computing.

Pico Computing works with its channel and technology partners worldwide to deliver complete computing solutions combining off-the-shelf computing servers with customized FPGA accelerator cards, software/hardware programming tools, and application libraries for cryptography, defense and security, financial and other HPC applications.

While Pico is not on everybody's radar, system builders may be familiar with the kind of channel program they've built around their FPGA cards and platforms -- which Pellerin compares to Nvidia's high-end Tesla graphics cards.

"Our cards are used in a way that's very similar to the way Nvidia's doing Tesla," he said. Which is to say that Pico's customized FPGA accelerator cards are powering highly integrated development and deployment platforms for some of the most demanding computing environments around.

"We will supply an organization with a cluster of these cards, and in some cases we will act as the system integrator, assembling the system, testing it, putting algorithms on there, etc.," Pellerin said, describing a staple business for Pico Computing, supplying research facilities with HPC solutions.

But not every FPGA card Pico builds winds up in dense, clustered environments. The company offers standard products that range from the tiny, CompactFlash format E-12 FPGA card, to large-scale FPGA clusters having as many as 160 FPGAs in a single 4U rack-mounted enclosure.

"We emphasize scalability. We've got everything from single cards in a laptop up to scaling out to larger clusters," Pellerin said.

Pico products are also used in embedded systems as well as in military, national security and HPC applications. Pico also provides custom hardware design engineering services, including FPGA platform development and hardware/firmware design.