Licence supports accelerated computing

The ACP M1 licensing package is available to system integrators for developing solutions that accelerate the performance of Intel processor-based server platforms while minimising power consumption.

Xilinx has begun commercial licensing of an FPGA-based acceleration solution designed to interface with the Intel Front Side Bus (FSB).

Enabled by the high-performance 65nm Virtex-5 platform FPGA and Intel QuickAssist Technology, the Xilinx Accelerated Computing Platform (ACP) M1 licensing package supports implementations capable of full 1066MHz FSB performance.

The ACP M1 licensing package is available to system integrators for developing solutions that accelerate the performance of Intel processor-based server platforms while minimising power consumption and total cost of ownership.

Although power efficiency is a critical requirement in many of today's computing environments, it conflicts with the growing demand for higher raw performance and throughput.

FPGA-based accelerators allow applications to achieve the highest possible performance while still maintaining power efficiency.

"High-performance ACP modules help fuel the growing demand for FSB-based accelerator solutions", said Lorie Wigle, Director of Server Technology and Initiatives Marketing, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel.

"Certain workloads in servers can benefit from closely coupled FPGA accelerators".

"With the Xilinx ACP M1, Intel QuickAssist technology and its accelerator abstraction layer, we expect our customers to benefit from a complete system solution".

Intel is supporting accelerator innovation targeting a variety of applications, markets and interconnects.

For FPGA-based accelerators attached to the FSB, Intel developed the Intel QuickAssist Technology Accelerator Abstraction Layer (AAL), a consistent set of platform-level services for accelerators.

The ACP licensing package includes a board reference design developed by Xilinx, FSB protocol IP jointly developed by Intel and Xilinx validated for 1066MHz operation and the Intel QuickAssist AAL driver.

The Xilinx ACP M1 hardware reference design is pin compatible to an Intel Socket 604 Xeon processor and is targeted for the new Intel Xeon processor 7300 series multiprocessor data centre platform.

With a 1066MHz FSB interface each Virtex-5 based ACP M1 module delivers 8.5Gbyte/s of system memory bandwidth.

Featuring four independent 1066MHz FSB interfaces the 7300 data centre platform delivers 34Gbyte/s of aggregate bandwidth which enables a variety of FPGA and Xeon processor configurations (1:3, 2:2, or 3:1 are supported) without compromising system throughput.

To demonstrate performance, one Virtex-5 FPGA-based ACP M1 module has been shown to accelerate a BGM-based Monte Carlo financial analytics application by over 30X compared to a single processor software only solution while consuming less than 15W.

"ACP modules are suitable for accelerating the performance of computationally intensive workload computing", said Ivo Bolsens, CTO of Xilinx.

"By leveraging the high-performance features of the Virtex-5 FPGA family, the ACP M1 supports transaction latencies of less than 120ns and can sustain burst transfers at full system speed".

"This performance enables platform developers to achieve superior application throughput without having to cluster multiple computers together or significantly increase their data centre power consumption or total cost of ownership".

The ACP M1 licence package is available now to qualified system integrators wishing to develop commercial FSB accelerated platforms based on Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs.

Qualification also requires an Intel FSB use licence.

The ACP M1 package includes a complete board reference design, FSB protocol IP qualified for operation at full 1066MHz and an Intel QuickAssist AAL driver.

Back to top