IBM Pairs Xilinx FPGAs to POWER8 to Create an Education Cloud Service
by Johan De Gelas on June 10, 2015 9:07 AM EST
Today IBM has announced "SuperVessel", an OpenStack based cloud service that enables students and developers to develop applications on a POWER 8 based infrastructure. What makes this cloud service interesting is the announcement that Hemant Dhulla, Vice President of Data Center and Wired Communications for Xilinx made:
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, a CAPI-enabled Xilinx FPGA is attached to every IBM POWER8 node in the SuperVessel cloud. The research and development being done in the SuperVessel is helping to define the future of heterogeneous computing.”
FPGAs, or field-programmable gate arrays are traditionally used to perform a specific algorithm in hardware. The result is a bulky and expensive chip (produced in low quantities) that runs a certain algorithms at very high speed and low latency.
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.
Intel has been delivering "customized" Xeons to large customers such as Amazon en Facebook, and has been promising that it will integrate Altera FPGAs inside certain Xeons. Intel recently bought Altera for $16.7 Billion.
But IBM seems to have beaten Intel to the FPGA 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.
The most interesting fact about "Supervessel" 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. What software did IBM implement to make offload some of the processing work to the Xilinx FPGAs? Unfortunately, so far we only saw the press release and it is very light on technical details. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the OpenPOWER Foundation is making a lot of progress in very little time - it was founded only at the end of 2013.
25 Comments
View All Comments
jenniferalena3 - Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - link
Basically, citizenship education is given the information & explaning the responsibilities to citizens Ashley HomeStore promo code (https://savingrite.com/store/ashley-homestore-coup... are willing to explain the responsibility to citizen to making their communities & contribute the political process. Replyjenniferalena3 - Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - link
Basically, citizenship education is given the information & explaning the responsibilities to citizens Ashley HomeStore promo code https://savingrite.com/store/ashley-homestore-coup... are willing to explain the responsibility to citizen to making their communities & contribute the political process. Replyjenniferalena3 - Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - link
Basically, citizenship education is given the information & explaning the responsibilities to citizens Ashley HomeStore promo code https://savingrite.com/store/ashley-homestore-coup... are willing to explain the responsibility to citizen to making their communities & contribute the political process. Replywilliamdavid - Wednesday, July 31, 2019 - link
Are you in dire need of a vacation from the academics? Can you no longer cope with the stress pushed down by your academic projects? You are not alone! Allow the professional essay writers employed by Essays Tigers, to take care of you. Provide us with your topic and we will return an outstanding essay! https://www.essaystigers.co.uk/ Replykeria139 - Saturday, August 17, 2019 - link
I have these advance technology of IBM it has too much capacity of resistance which will be great for long-lasting work on laptop.https://www.nationalaccidentsupportline.co.uk/work... Reply
davidmitchell139 - Saturday, August 17, 2019 - link
Incredible post since this new innovation is gaining fast ground in such a short spam of time.https://www.endreviews.com/lenovo-yoga-920-review/ Reply
sonia139 - Tuesday, August 20, 2019 - link
Which server is great IBM or SUN? Would we be able to run Linux/Unix or Windows on Sun servers?https://scholeacademy.pk/about-us.php Replynoahhill - Thursday, August 29, 2019 - link
Hi! If you have any writing problems then you can apply to the essay writing service such as https://essaysprofessor.com/ There you can get all the necessary information that can solve any problem. Replymike20 - Thursday, March 5, 2020 - link
My tutor helped me a notable deal today with my fluency in speaking with a few reading classes, even letting me repeat after her with a purpose to recognize how I should sound. Before this lesson, the task of sounding greater like a herbal speaker become very daunting to me. I now look forward to placing <a href="https://papergraders.net/reviews/wiseessays-com/&q... reviews</a> and telling other about this site. Replymike20 - Thursday, March 5, 2020 - link
My tutor helped me a notable deal today with my fluency in speaking with a few reading classes, even letting me repeat after her with a purpose to recognize how I should sound. Before this lesson, the task of sounding greater like a herbal speaker become very daunting to me. I now look forward to placing https://papergraders.net/reviews/wiseessays-com/">wiseessays reviews and telling other about this site. Reply