Maxwell – a 64 FPGA Supercomputer

The authors describe the FPGA-based supercomputer Maxwell built by the FPGA high-performance computing alliance at the University of Edinburgh. Winner of the silver medal in the BT Flagship Award for Innovation at the 2007 British Computer Society Awards, Maxwell is a general-purpose 64 FPGA computer designed for high-performance parallel computing. This paper describes the machine itself, its hardware and software environment and presents benchmark results from runs of three commercial demonstration applications from the oil, medical and finance sectors.