Altera, IBM unveil FPGA-accelerated systems coherently attached to POWER CPU

NEW ORLEANS, USA: Altera Corp. and IBM unveiled the industry’s first FPGA-based acceleration platform that coherently connects an FPGA to a POWER8 CPU leveraging IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI).

The reconfigurable hardware accelerator features shared virtual memory between the FPGA and processor which significantly improves system performance, efficiency and flexibility in high-performance computing (HPC) and data center applications. Altera and IBM are presenting several POWER8 systems that are coherently accelerated using FPGAs at SuperComputing 2014.

Working together through the OpenPOWER Foundation, Altera and IBM are developing highly flexible heterogeneous compute solutions that bring new levels of performance and efficiency to POWER8 systems. FPGA-accelerated POWER8 systems are optimized to enable compute- and processing-intensive tasks required in next-generation HPC and data center applications, including data compression, encryption, image processing and search.

Using CAPI to coherently attach FPGA accelerators to the fabric of a POWER8 processor and main system memory make the FPGA appear as simply another core on the POWER8 processor. This results in shortened development time by greatly reducing lines of software code and reduced processor cycles versus conventional IO attached accelerators. A single FPGA-accelerated POWER8 server is able to operate at industry-leading levels of efficiency, allowing system architects to cut their data center footprint in half.

“As today’s high-performance computing applications evolve with rapidly changing workloads, it is imperative we build in flexible accelerators to make IBM POWER processors more efficient in IBM POWER Systems and all OpenPOWER compatible systems,” said Brad McCredie, VP of IBM Power development and OpenPOWER president. “The work Altera has done to provide FPGA-based reconfigurable hardware acceleration to our POWER processors enabled through CAPI allows software developers to build highly efficient, highly flexible, performance optimized systems.”

Altera and IBM have worked with board partner Nallatech to develop an OpenPOWER CAPI Development Kit for POWER8 that features Nallatech’s FPGA-based 385 card, the industry’s first CAPI FPGA accelerator card. This off-the-shelf development platform allows designers to start using FPGA accelerators with POWER8 systems.

The Altera SDK for OpenCL provides developers the resources they need to develop their own custom FPGA-based accelerators and gain a time to market, power and performance advantage. The release of the OpenCL 2.0 specification supports shared virtual memory capabilities which enable programmers to address memory shared by the host and accelerator using CAPI.