Looking to drive the adoption of field programmable gate array chips (FPGA) as co-processors for high-performance computing applications, Altera has announced the development of a new programme to support academic research.

The programmable logic firm, together with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Sun Microsystems and XtremeData, will donate $1m in workstation and development software to universities.

The program has made its first awards of workstations to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The workstations will complement the “Trusted ILLIAC,” a 500-processor programmable hardware/software cluster that utilises FPGA co-processors to for large-scale computing.

“This combined effort creates a valuable new programme that we can immediately begin leveraging for our high-performance secure computing research,” said Professor Wen-mei Hwu. Hwu is the holder of the Jerry Sanders-AMD Endowed Chair in Electrical & Computer Engineering and leader of the Embedded and Enterprise Systems Theme of Illinois’ Information Trust Institute. “Research results derived from the donated systems will aid the commercial adoption of FPGA co-processing.”

“We see FPGAs as an essential component of next-generation parallel computing systems because programmable logic provides the unique capability to customize and accelerate both computation and memory system behavior,” said Professor Kunle Olukotun, of Stanford University's Computer Systems Lab, in a statement. “FPGAs are particularly valuable in a computer system’s research environment because they allow new architecture ideas to be evaluated at hardware speeds.”

 “Universities will apply these systems to accelerate applications with this new FPGA co-processor model,” said Mike Strickland, director strategic and technical marketing for Altera’s computer and storage business unit. “This cooperation results in a robust solution which is of immediate value to many research programmes.”

Applications to this university programme can be made through the XtremeData or Altera websites. Upon selection, complete development systems will be made available to research recipients. Multiple system donations to individual research teams are planned.