Xilinx Chips Selected as Reconfigurable Computing Engine in Octigabay 12K

OctigaBay and Xilinx partner to accelerate high performance computing applications

SAN JOSE, Calif., and VANCOUVER, Canada, November 3, 2003 - Xilinx Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX) and OctigaBay Systems Corp. today announced that OctigaBay has integrated Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs into the OctigaBay 12K high performance computer. Purpose-built for the engineering and scientific community, the OctigaBay 12K combines technical innovations in interconnect, management and reconfigurable computing to address the insatiable demand for high performance computing resources.

The OctigaBay 12K incorporates six Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGAs into each 3VU shelf to provide unprecedented application acceleration capabilities. Tightly coupled with 12 AMD Opteron 64-bit processors and a one terabit per second switch fabric-eliminating PCI bus limitations- the FPGAs use standard message passing and memory copy operations to simplify the software interaction and programming model.

The Xilinx Platform FPGAs act as application acceleration coprocessors, providing superlinear speedup for applications like searching, sorting, signal processing and encryption. The FPGAs also provide in-transit processing-essentially performing calculations on data flows before arriving at the destination processor-ideal for collective operations like MPI all_reduce. In both situations, the Xilinx FPGAs offer massive parallel speedup, resulting in better overall application performance.

"An integral part of the OctigaBay 12K, Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs provided the ultimate connectivity platform addressing our high-performance, high-speed system requirements," said John Seminerio, President and CEO of OctigaBay. "Not only does this translate to better price/performance, it also results in faster time-to-market."

"OctigaBay's application of our Platform FPGAs demonstrates the emerging role of programmable logic in the field of reconfigurable computing," said Sandeep Vij, vice president of worldwide marketing at Xilinx "and the unique OctigaBay architecture will open up whole new avenues of research and exploration for the high performance computing community."

Matt Leininger, principal member of the technical staff from Sandia National Laboratories, agrees "We've been seriously investigating the use of FPGAs and their potential to rapidly accelerate scientific and engineering computations. The combination of high performance commodity processors, FPGAs, and a balanced communication bandwidth is a flexible design that hold significant promise for us to accelerate our research."

About the OctigaBay 12K
The revolutionary architectural design of the OctigaBay 12K outperforms existing SMP platforms, while the use of off-the-shelf components dramatically reduces overall cost. Each OctigaBay 12K shelf provides:

• 12 AMD Opteron 64-bit x-86 compatible processors for 58 GFLOPS;
  
• HPC-optimized Linux operating system;
  
• 12 specialized communications processors and a 1 Tb/s embedded switching fabric provide up to 8 GB/s to each AMD Opteron with 1 microsecond latency;
  
• Dedicated system management software, hardware and supervisory network;
  
• Active Manager GUI for ease of operation, maintenance and management; and

Six Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGAs) processors for application acceleration.

Up to 12 OctigaBay 12K shelves can be assembled in a single rack, providing 691 GFLOPS of processing power. OctigaBay 12K systems scale to over 12,000 processors without requiring any external switches. The OctigaBay 12K system will be featured at SuperComputing 2003 in Phoenix, AZ, November 17 - 19, 2003. Systems will be commercially available early in 2004.

About Xilinx Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs
The Xilinx Virtex-II Pro family is the world's first and only FPGA to offer integrated PowerPC embedded technology and 3.125 Gbps serial transceivers. Virtex-II Pro devices include these multiple PowerPC CPUs and multi-gigabit serial transceivers at no additional charge, providing unequaled capability and value for today's system design requirements. With over 10,000 worldwide customer engagements, Virtex-II Pro FPGAs have seen rapid adoption in a wide-range of applications.

About OctigaBay Systems Corporation
OctigaBay Systems Corporation is pioneering an innovative new class of High Performance Computing products that delivers the performance of high-end SMP systems at a fraction of the cost. Addressing the most challenging needs of business and research institutions, OctigaBay's products are ideal for simulation, modeling, searching, sorting, data mining and other processing intensive applications. For more information, please visit www.octigabay.com or contact us at info@octigabay.com.

About Xilinx
Xilinx is the worldwide leader in complete programmable logic solutions. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com.