HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


Gidel IPs. The company also provide tools for synthesis of C++ code and a support package for OpenCL. ‘One of the challenges with FPGAs is how to make it accessible for software engineers. We all know that you have more software engineers than hardware engineers, and you need to see how they can work with your FPGA hardware,’ stated Ofer. ‘OpenCL, for example, is trying to fill up the gap and give some options for the software engineer to work with, but the price that you have to pay is the efficiency. If you go to other methodologies that you have, such as HDL, then you need to have hardware engineers. ‘We are trying to work to give the engineers the way to allocate the board to their IP, not the IP to the board,’ added Ofer. Reuven Weintraub, founder and CTO at Gidel, noted that the development of these tools allows users to develop applications that maximise the efficiency of FPGA resources. ‘It is possible to use our tools with


‘We are trying to work to give the engineers the way to allocate the board to their IP, not the IP to the board’


in several different markets. ‘Gidel is a company that was established almost 27 years ago. ‘We are working to deliver boards based


on Intel FPGAs, previously Altera, since day one. Right now we are focusing on several different markets from HPC to vision.’ The company has developed its own set


of tools for developing code and applying it to the configurable logic of the FPGA. For example in 2018, Gidel announced


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its own lossless compression IP which utilised just one per cent of an FPGA board. ‘All the IP that we are developing, or our customer is developing on our board, is actually using our tools. When we develop JPEG compression, lossless compression the InfiniVision IP by using our tools, we can get a much faster delivery date,’ stated Ofer. The toolkit from Gidel includes its


ProcDev Kit, which helps users to automatically tailor the process of building the infrastructure required to support algorithm development by optimising the use of FPGAs, on-board memory resources and FPGAs to host communication. The developer’s kit includes the


ProcWizard application, API, examples of HDL and software libraries, and


the HLS (high-level synthesis) and then use some HDL (hardware description language) coding for what takes more logic,’ added Weintraub. ‘This way the combination of our tools both the HLS and the HDL can give you well-optimised development. ‘In these options we are definitely unique in the market. When it is pure OpenCL there are several companies doing that including Intel and Xilinx, but when we are dealing with optimisation I would say that from feedback from our customers there is a big gap between our tools and other tools available.’ Another innovation at Gidel is the use of


several applications running or accessing the same FPGA. ‘This has potential use cases in


autonomous vehicles or AI and ML, as it can be used to take data from or process images or data from sensors. ‘In automotive recording systems, this enables us to take many sensors whether with or without pre-processing, compression and then store all the sensors together,’ concluded Weintraub.


August/September 2019 Scientific Computing World 11


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