The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sarsen Style.

Today is the twelfth of the twelfth of the twelfth. So we're carrying on the theme and bringing you the Twelve Days of Christmas, in our own special way.

(Feel free to join in....)

On the first day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

A BittWare Anemone

On the second day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the third day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the fourth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the fifth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the sixth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

Well done guys, half way through....

On the seventh day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the eighth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the ninth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the tenth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Ten General Standards boards,

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

Nearly there, keep going!

On the eleventh day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Eleven Iguanas,

Ten General Standards boards,

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone

On the twelfth day of Christmas,

Sarsen sent to me

Twelve Trenton Backplanes,

Eleven Iguanas,

Ten General Standards boards,

Nine Tech Source Condors

Eight Amazon Streamstors,

Seven Half-length Stratix V boards,

Six RACKtangle chassis

Five Copperheads,

Four dspBloks

Three Cisco Routers,

Two UEI Cubes

And a BittWare Anemone!

Hurrah! Next up, We Wish You a Merry Christmas.......

BittWare's Anemone - A New Approach to Floating Point DSP

Ah-ne-MO-nee
It’s a word that is quite often mis-pronounced.
It’s not Ane-No-Me. Or worse – An-En-ema. Definitely not that!

BittWare’s first generation Anemone chip, the Anemone104 (AN104) is a completely scalable multicore processor with 16 eCores that provide a total sustained performance of 19.2 GFLOPS while consuming only 1 Watt of core power.

Featuring the Epiphany architecture from Adapteva, the BittWare Anemone combines the best assets of both FPGA and floating point DSP technology, thereby offering a completely new approach to floating point digital signal processing. The FPGA handles all the memory, I/O interfacing, protocol processing, and special functions, in addition to any computational tasks it may perform. This leaves the Anemone free to perform the complex processing tasks that DSPs are ideal for.

The AN104 features an internal high-throughput mesh network, with separate data paths for on-chip and off-chip communications. Total on-chip, inter-core bandwidth is 76.8 GBytes/sec full duplex, with an additional 8 GBytes/sec of off-chip bandwidth.

The BittWare Anemone Evaluation Kit provides a cost-effective way to begin evaluating the Anemone co-processor for FPGAs, featuring an Anemone104 and Altera Stratix III FPGA based evaluation board - ready to use out of the box, with the Ubuntu Linux OS and Anemone development tools installed on an included laptop.

This is pretty new technology – if you would like more information give the Sarsen sales team a call on +44 1672 511166 or send us an email.

High Frequency Trading speak to CEO Jeff Milrod about BittWare's FPGA development for the Low-Latency Financial Market

High performance computing using FPGA technology is a key technology for the financial services industry. High frequency automated financial trading uses models and simulations to provide real-time assistance in decision making. 

BittWare has designed and developed a family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware optimised for this market. BittWare CEO Jeff Milrod has been speaking to High Frequency Traders about how this technology has made the low-latency financial market very excited.....

HFT: BittWare has been in business for quite a while, but you’ve only got into the financial space comparatively recently. How did this come about?

Jeff Milrod: "We’ve been producing commercial off-the-shelf signal processing boards and high performance computing boards since 1989 and they’ve been used in a wide variety of markets over the years.

Military is big component of our business as are wireless telecommunications, high-end instrumentation and medical imaging. More recently, we’ve actually had the finance market come to us. In the last couple of years it has decided that FPGAs are very attractive platforms for reducing the latency and increasing the performance of a lot of their applications. It just so happens that we have some of the best FPGA boards in the world. We were approached by financial market customers who thought our engines could work very well for them, so we’ve been working hard to learn more about the market and to figure out how to modify our boards slightly and add additional IP to create better solutions for the finance space.

One thing that’s unique about what we do, particularly compared to some of our competitors in the finance market, is that we consider ourselves a horizontal enabling technology. It’s expressed in our slogan ‘Essential building blocks…Innovative solutions.’ We want to provide building blocks for our customers and allow them to add the unique vertical application-specific value themselves. We don’t believe that’s our role. There’s a commonality across all markets for the underlying processing engines – be they implemented with signal processors or FPGAs – with relation to high speed data movement, power conditioning and control, thermal management and obsolescence management for deployed world class system solutions."

The full interview can be found here - High Frequency Traders.

Please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 if you would like any more information!

Altera Stratix® V GX/GS PCIe Board with VITA 57 FMC I/O Site or Dual QSFP+. Copyright BittWare.

March Edition of News Bytes now online

The March 2012 edition of News Bytes includes news stories on BittWare Anemone™ Co-Processor for FPGA Boards, The Low-Latency Summit for financial trading 2012, Wildcat PCI-104 SBC with Intel Core 2 Duo processor, MIL-COTS LCD Touchscreen Monitor With Sealed Keyboard, United Electronics Industries (UEI) to Exhibit at ITEC 2012, Conduant SNAP12 Optical FPGA Card, BittWare BittWorks II Release Notes and Electronic Engineering Journal: Reducing Power Consumption and Increasing Bandwidth on 28-nm FPGAs.

Link to the March News Bytes Newsletter:

Sarsen Technology web site homepage

BittWare International Sales Conference 2011

Nigel, Robbie & Tim travelled to Concord, NH at the end of September for BittWare's 2011 International Distributor Sales & Traing Conference. We learnt about lots of new exciting technology including the Altera Stratix V COTS hardware & the new Anemone FPGA Co-Processor. We also travelled one evening to the Castle in the Clouds in the White Mountains in New Hampshire where the photo above was taken.

BittWare Anemone - A New Approach to Floating Point DSP

Traditional floating point DSPs, while excellent at complex processing tasks, have limitations when it comes to chip real estate and power efficiency that have caused them to become an endangered species. And FPGAs, while superior for versatility and configurability, can be difficult to use for complex and evolving applications. The BittWare Anemone, featuring the Epiphany architecture from Adapteva, enables the best assets of both to be combined, thereby offering a completely new approach to floating point digital signal processing. This hybrid solution provides a standard processor software development environment working in conjunction with a world-class FPGA platform, allowing users to optimally partition their algorithms into hardware and software. The result is superior development productivity and unmatched system size, weight, and power.