OREANDA-NEWS.  Programmable logic technology from Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) is now in place inside a new, advanced server cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University Texas at Austin, which seeks to help researchers and academia to run complex algorithmic-based research. Microsoft Research shared more about the server cluster going becoming available for research use at TACC, in a blog post today: http://bit.ly/1M81HTQ. Altera field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are used as accelerators on the Microsoft Project Catapult board, and turn commodity servers into high-performance, power-efficient machines.

Researchers are now invited to use TACC resources to run their software programs and algorithms, associated with, but not limited to, deep learning, convolutional neural networks (CNN), facial and object recognition, online search, and even genomic research. TACC also offers free use of boards to students, professors and the community in its ongoing effort to provide access to world-class high performance computing systems.

“TACC’s 14-year history is impressive, and we are pleased Altera technology will be the latest asset in the center’s compute arsenal,” said Erhaan Shaikh, vice president, Infrastructure Division, Altera Business Units. “By making these high-performance servers with our FPGAs inside available to researchers, we anticipate that much progress will be made the fields of science, math, medicine and all areas requiring these powerful computations.”

About the Texas Advanced Computing Center
The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) designs and operates some of the world's most powerful computing resources. The center's mission is to enable discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. To learn more about TACC, visit www.tacc.utexas.edu.

About Altera Computer and Storage Solutions
Altera® FPGAs can be used to accelerate the performance of large-scale data systems. Altera FPGAs enable higher speed data processing by providing customized high-bandwidth, low-latency connections to network and storage systems. In addition, Altera FPGAs provide compression, data filtering, and algorithmic acceleration.