Tachyum Adds Watchdog Timers to Prodigy FPGA

Tachyum^® today announced that it has added a watchdog timer to its Prodigy^® FPGA emulation system to help detect and recovery from device or system malfunction. The mechanism facilitates automatic correction of temporary hardware faults and prevents errant or malevolent software from disrupting system operations.

Available as both a hardware and virtualized time, Prodigy's watchdog is part of a self-healing infrastructure within datacenters. It allows the automatic recovery of servers that hang without human intervention. This functionality is important for organizations with hundreds to thousands of servers.

Prodigy's hardware watchdog timer must be cleared by the operating system based on a programmable timeout value or it will trigger a non-maskable interrupt. The watchdog performs corrective actions by initiating a soft reboot. If unsuccessful, it will attempt to boot the OS on a single core, save the kernel dump and then perform a hard reboot.

For a virtualized environment, the watchdogs are virtualized themselves so that each VM maintains an individual timer.

"At the most basic level, a watchdog is a mechanism that resets a computer if something goes wrong," said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, founder and CEO of Tachyum. "This can encompass detecting any number of issues within the system, making a watchdog that will not only identify the problem but automatically initiate corrective issues is a valuable feature. As we continue to progress towards Prodigy's commercial release, it makes sense that our FPGA performs with watchdogs in place to ensure success of systems that incorporate our Universal Processor chip."

As a Universal Processor offering industry-leading performance for all workloads, Prodigy-powered data center servers can seamlessly and dynamically switch between computational domains (such as AI/ML, HPC, and cloud) with a single homogeneous architecture. By eliminating the need for expensive dedicated AI hardware and dramatically increasing server utilization, Prodigy reduces CAPEX and OPEX significantly while delivering unprecedented data center performance, power, and economics. Prodigy integrates 192 high-performance custom-designed 64-bit compute cores, to deliver up to 4.5x the performance of the highest-performing x86 processors for cloud workloads, up to 3x that of the highest performing GPU for HPC, and 6x for AI applications.

A video demonstration of a watchdog timer working on a Prodigy FPGA emulation system is available for viewing at https://youtu.be/Vsu5G9jE0Ec.

Follow Tachyum
https://twitter.com/tachyum
https://www.linkedin.com/company/tachyum
https://www.facebook.com/Tachyum/

About Tachyum

Tachyum is transforming the economics of AI, HPC, public and private cloud workloads with Prodigy, the world's first Universal Processor. Prodigy unifies the functionality of a CPU, a GPU, and a TPU in a single processor to deliver industry-leading performance, cost and power efficiency for both specialty and general-purpose computing. As global data center emissions continue to contribute to a changing climate, with projections of their consuming 10 percent of the world's electricity by 2030, the ultra-low power Prodigy is positioned to help balance the world's appetite for computing at a lower environmental cost. Tachyum recently received a major purchase order from a US company to build a large-scale system that can deliver more than 50 exaflops performance, which will exponentially exceed the computational capabilities of the fastest inference or generative AI supercomputers available anywhere in the world today. When complete in 2025, the Prodigy-powered system will deliver a 25x multiplier vs. the world's fastest conventional supercomputer ? built just this year ? and will achieve AI capabilities 25,000x larger than models for ChatGPT4. Tachyum has offices in the United States and Slovakia. For more information, visit https://www.tachyum.com/.