News
- December 1, 2014
- Research Projects
Synelixis announces completion of FASTER
Synelixis Solutions Ltd, a leading provider of telecommunications, networking, sensory, control and automation solutions, announces the completion of the EU Research Project FASTER, where it participated as an industrial partner.
The FASTER research project focused on developing easy-to-use tools to enable programmers to change the FPGA chip functionality, allowing run-time reconfiguration to be exploited to further improve the benefits that reconfigurable accelerators promise over general purpose systems. Reconfigurable FPGA hardware has been proven to deliver 10-100x greater performance per unit of space, power or cost than general purpose CPUs for a wide range of applications. Synelixis has adopted FPGA technology for its networking solutions in order to provide the performance that a fully custom hardware solution can offer with the flexibility that the changing customer/application requirements demand.
Through its participation in FASTER, Synelixis managed to significantly upgrade the capabilities of its purely hardware-based Intrusion Detection System/Intrusion Prevention System (IDS/IPS) system by adding functionality that allows easy and fast system modifications that require minimal or no system downtime and without impact on the performance of the system. Furthermore, frequent changes that need to be applied (such as IP to block) can now be applied by system administrators rather than dedicated field application engineers, thus significantly reducing the overall cost of its solutions.
While the solutions developed in FASTER have not yet reached production systems, initial customer feedback is positive. “We see great interest from industry customers on our networking systems based on reconfigurable hardware as these solutions can meet their demands much more effectively than general-purpose processor-based systems. Offering the performance levels that hardware solutions can provide with the flexibility typically associated to software-defined networks is an extremely valuable proposition” said Nikolaos Nikolakis, Synelixis CEO. “Exploiting the benefits of the technology arising from the FASTER project can help us offer a very solid product portfolio with significant advantages against the competition, while application to our SynField product portfolio is also under investigation.”