Micron will soon begin selling a new co-processor based on its memory technology.
The new technology is called Automata Processor and reflects the vendor's leadership and experience in memory design.
"Micron's Automata Processor technology is a radical departure from traditional compute offload accelerators," said Paul Teich, Micron CTO and senior analyst. "Micron's technology has the potential to accelerate high-value segments of big data pattern recognition for complex, unstructured data streams, some of which are not economical to address at scale today."
While the technology will not be commercially released until sometime next year, the company has released a software development kit that will help developers get acquainted with it.
Similar to graphics processors, Automata Processor technology is focused on executing a number of small processes at once. This could come in handy across a variety of fields, including bioinformatics and mass video.
"By providing a fundamentally new and powerful technology, plus the tools to operate and program it, Micron is providing developers and customers an entirely new way to power their innovation," said Paul Dlugosch, director of Automata Processor development.
"One of the most challenging problems facing the developer community today is programmer productivity. In many cases, productivity is lost as developers work to identify and implement high levels of parallelism on conventional architectures. The Automata Processor and SDK will provide a new alternative for implementing very high levels of hardware parallelism without the complexities associated with von Neumann-style architectures."
The processors features a reconfigurable architecture, meaning developers can change how the processor works based on needs. In combining computational elements with data, Automata Processor will help reduce latency that often comes with getting data into a processor. Not only that, but the company has also designed the capability to execute one instruction across a number of different data sets, making it a lower-power processor for tasks like graph analysis and pattern matching.
To help educate users on the new technology, Micron has partnered with the University of Virginia to create the Center for Automata Processing, where research and teaching about the technology can take place.
The SDK for the technology includes a visual code editor, a compiler, a rules checker and an Automata Processor simulator. It is available from Micron upon request and will be demonstrated Nov. 17-20 in New Orleans at the 2014 Supercomputing Conference.
