high-performance computing
Xilinx produces a wide range of FPGA chips
that both of them are programmable. Te difference is coming from the fact that in the FPGA all the instructions would run in parallel. Actually the FPGA is not a processor; it is compiled to be a dedicated set of hardware components according to the requirements of the algorithm – that is what gives it the efficiency, power savings and so on.’ Traditionally this power efficiency,
scalability, and flexible architecture came at the price of more complex programming: code needed to address the hardware and the flow of data across the various components, in addition to providing the basic instruction set to be computed in the logic blocks. However, major FPGA manufacturers Altera and Xilinx have both
www.scientific-computing.com l
been working on their own OpenCL based solutions which have the potential to make FPGA acceleration a real possibility for more general HPC workloads.
Development toolkits Xilinx has recently released SDAccel, a development environment that includes soſtware tools including its own compiler, tools for code development, profiling, and debugging, and provides a GPU-like work environment. Getman said: ‘Our goal is to make an FPGA as easy to program as a GPU. SDAccel, which is OpenCL based, does allow people to program in OpenCL and C or C++ and they can now target the FPGA at a very high level.’ In addition, SDAccel provides
@scwmagazine
functionality to swap multiple kernels in and out of the FPGA without disrupting the interface between the server CPU and the FPGA. Tis could be a key enabler of FPGAs in real-world data centres where turning off some of your resources while you re-optimise them for the next application is not an economically viable strategy at present. Altera has been working closely with the
Khronos group, which oversees a number of open computing standards including OpenCL, OpenGL, and WebGL. Altera released a development toolkit, Altera’s SDK for OpenCL, in May 2013. Strickland said: ‘In May 2013 we achieved a very important conformance test with the standards body – the Khronos group – that manages
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2015 27
➤
Xilinx
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41