INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Green Technology
Thales boosts biometric
matching performance while
halving environmental impact
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With Gemalto’s commercial offthe-shelf
FPGA solution, Thales
allows the number of servers
used to be cut in half and
dramatically limit the overall
carbon footprint.
Thales, a world leader in digital
security, is using innovative assets
from the aerospace industry to
boost its Biometric Matching System
(BMS) performance while reducing the
environmental impact. The BMS is the heart
of government digital identification systems.
Introducing interoperability with its border
management system requires multiple
processing of hundreds of millions of
biometric database records within one to
two seconds.
Gemalto’s Automated Fingerprint
Identification System (AFIS) and
Automated Biometric Identification
System (ABIS) are scalable and
customisable solutions, providing a
range of functionalities for processing,
editing, searching, retrieving, and storing
fingerprint, palm print, face and iris
images and biographic subject records.
With FPGA, ABIS makes it easier for
government agencies to run very large and
complex multi-biometric solutions with
remarkable matching accuracy and speed,
enabling states to better protect and serve
their citizens.
“Our FPGA based solution can cut data
centre investment and space overall by more
than a half, while reducing CO 2 emissions
by around 50%. Gemalto technology brings
new options for governments wishing to
prioritise environmental sustainability,
without in any way impacting national
security,” said Youzec Kurp – SVP Identity
and Biometric Solutions at Thales. “The
alternative of a pure ‘Central Procession
Unit’ based approach for biometric data
matching requires massive computing
capacity – even, in some cases, up to four
times more servers than Gemalto’s approach
– to perform the same transaction.” •
To perform data comparison at this
scale Gemalto, a Thales company,
is applying commercial off-the-shelf
Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)
technology, originally designed for ultra-low
latency applications in high performance
computing (HPC) environments in financial
and scientific industries, which is compatible
with any server and cloud.
Specifically, Gemalto uses these FPGA boards
for matching hundreds of millions of biometric
fingerprint templates which are digital
signatures, created from fingerprint images.
This proven solution also allows for much
faster data processing and greater matching
accuracy, while at the same time limiting
infrastructure costs and cutting carbon
emissions. Depending on server and system
specification, it can require up to 75% less
servers and energy overall.
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