Tachyum Adds Watchdog Timers to Prodigy FPGA
May 07 2024 - 12:11PM
Business Wire
Tachyum® today announced that it has added a watchdog timer to
its Prodigy® FPGA emulation system to help detect and recovery from
device or system malfunction. The mechanism facilitates automatic
correction of temporary hardware faults and prevents errant or
malevolent software from disrupting system operations.
Available as both a hardware and virtualized time, Prodigy’s
watchdog is part of a self-healing infrastructure within
datacenters. It allows the automatic recovery of servers that hang
without human intervention. This functionality is important for
organizations with hundreds to thousands of servers.
Prodigy’s hardware watchdog timer must be cleared by the
operating system based on a programmable timeout value or it will
trigger a non-maskable interrupt. The watchdog performs corrective
actions by initiating a soft reboot. If unsuccessful, it will
attempt to boot the OS on a single core, save the kernel dump and
then perform a hard reboot.
For a virtualized environment, the watchdogs are virtualized
themselves so that each VM maintains an individual timer.
“At the most basic level, a watchdog is a mechanism that resets
a computer if something goes wrong,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak,
founder and CEO of Tachyum. “This can encompass detecting any
number of issues within the system, making a watchdog that will not
only identify the problem but automatically initiate corrective
issues is a valuable feature. As we continue to progress towards
Prodigy’s commercial release, it makes sense that our FPGA performs
with watchdogs in place to ensure success of systems that
incorporate our Universal Processor chip.”
As a Universal Processor offering industry-leading performance
for all workloads, Prodigy-powered data center servers can
seamlessly and dynamically switch between computational domains
(such as AI/ML, HPC, and cloud) with a single homogeneous
architecture. By eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI
hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization, Prodigy
reduces CAPEX and OPEX significantly while delivering unprecedented
data center performance, power, and economics. Prodigy integrates
192 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to
deliver up to 4.5x the performance of the highest-performing x86
processors for cloud workloads, up to 3x that of the highest
performing GPU for HPC, and 6x for AI applications.
A video demonstration of a watchdog timer working on a Prodigy
FPGA emulation system is available for viewing at
https://youtu.be/Vsu5G9jE0Ec.
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About Tachyum
Tachyum is transforming the economics of AI, HPC, public and
private cloud workloads with Prodigy, the world’s first Universal
Processor. Prodigy unifies the functionality of a CPU, a GPU, and a
TPU in a single processor to deliver industry-leading performance,
cost and power efficiency for both specialty and general-purpose
computing. As global data center emissions continue to contribute
to a changing climate, with projections of their consuming 10
percent of the world’s electricity by 2030, the ultra-low power
Prodigy is positioned to help balance the world’s appetite for
computing at a lower environmental cost. Tachyum recently received
a major purchase order from a US company to build a large-scale
system that can deliver more than 50 exaflops performance, which
will exponentially exceed the computational capabilities of the
fastest inference or generative AI supercomputers available
anywhere in the world today. When complete in 2025, the
Prodigy-powered system will deliver a 25x multiplier vs. the
world’s fastest conventional supercomputer – built just this year –
and will achieve AI capabilities 25,000x larger than models for
ChatGPT4. Tachyum has offices in the United States and Slovakia.
For more information, visit https://www.tachyum.com/.
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Mark Smith JPR Communications 818-398-1424 marks@jprcom.com