Scottish supercomputer wins prize

Maxwell, a supercomputer built in Scotland, has won a medal at the British Computer Society IT Industry Awards.

The computer was built by FPGA High Performance Computing Alliance, and won a runner-up place in the BT Flagship Award for Innovation category.

The FHPCA was established in 2004 to promote the use of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an alternative to microprocessers. Maxwell uses FPGAs and according to FHPCA, requires much less space and cooling, is more than 100 times more energy-efficient and up to 300 times faster than a conventional microprocessor system.

Maxwell has been applied in sectors ranging from oil and gas to finance. In one demonstration, the Alliance implemented the Black-Scholes algorithm, which is commonly used to calculate future stock prices, and results showed that the algorithm ran 320 times faster per FPGA on Maxwell than on the host PC.