HoTWiReZ's DoMaiN

[News BoT]

<p align="center"></p><p><p>Today IBM has announced "SuperVessel", an OpenStack based&nbsp;cloud service&nbsp;that enables students and&nbsp;developers to develop applications on a POWER 8 based infrastructure. What makes this cloud service interesting is the announcement that&nbsp;Hemant Dhulla, Vice President of Data Center and Wired Communications for Xilinx made:</p>

<blockquote>Xilinx is delighted to have been chosen as the provider of FPGA accelerators for the IBM SuperVessel cloud. FPGA-based compute acceleration is a critical part of the OpenPOWER Foundation vision to handle demanding workloads in the most cost and power-efficient way. For this reason, <strong>a CAPI-enabled Xilinx FPGA is attached to every IBM POWER8 node in the SuperVessel cloud</strong>. The research and development being done in the SuperVessel is helping to define the future of heterogeneous computing.&rdquo;</blockquote>

<p>FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays are traditionally used to perform a specific algorithm in hardware. The result is a&nbsp;bulky and&nbsp;expensive chip (produced in low quantities) that runs a certain algorithms at very high speed and low latency.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Offloading some processing tasks to a specialized chip is certainly nothing new. APUs are CPUs that offload some of their tasks to integrated GPUs. But quite a few parallel algorithms run fast but pretty inefficiently on GPUs. In many cases, an FPGA uses a lot less power.&nbsp;</p>

<p>Intel has been delivering "customized" Xeons to large customers such as Amazon en Facebook, and has been promising that it will integrate&nbsp;Altera&nbsp;FPGAs&nbsp;inside certain&nbsp;Xeons.&nbsp;&nbsp;Intel recently bought Altera for $16.7&nbsp;Billion.&nbsp;</p>

<p>But IBM seems to have beaten Intel to the FPGA&nbsp;punch with CAPI, the POWER8's Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface. IBM does not integrate FPGA inside the POWER8 package (yet), but communicates coherently over the PCI express interface.&nbsp;</p>

<p>The most interesting fact about "Supervessel"&nbsp;that is IBM has managed to make a cloud service that makes ample us of - traditionally expensive - FPGAs, and that the necessary software is in place to make it relatively easy to make use of those FPGAs. &nbsp;<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); line-height: 21px;">What software did IBM implement to make offload some of the processing work to&nbsp;the Xilinx FPGAs? U</span>nfortunately, so far we only saw the press release and it is very light on technical details. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the POWER 8 Fondation is making a lot of progress in very little time - it has been founded at the end of 2013.</p>
</p>

Read more...

Source: AnandTech
This channel features the latest computer hardware related articles.