Enterprise IT vendor IBM today announced a deal to enable data center applications through Xilinx FPGA-enabled workload acceleration on IBM POWER-based systems.
IBM and Xilinx will develop open acceleration infrastructures, software and middleware to address emerging applications such as machine learning, network functions virtualization (NFV), genomics, high performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics.
IBM said its POWER architecture together with Xilinx FPGAs provide compelling performance, performance/watt and lower total cost of ownership for the next generation data centers workloads.
As part of the engagement, IBM Systems Group developers will create solution stacks for POWER-based servers, storage and middleware systems with Xilinx FPGA accelerators for data center architectures such as OpenStack, Docker, and Spark.
IBM will develop and qualify Xilinx accelerator boards into IBM Power Systems servers. Xilinx is developing and will release POWER-based versions of its leading software defined SDAccel Development Environment and libraries for the OpenPOWER developer community.
IBM and Xilinx will utilize IBM’s Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) to deliver accelerated computing value to its clients. CAPI, a feature built into the POWER architecture, provides Xilinx the ability to build integrated, coherent solutions right on top of the POWER architecture.
“The combination of IBM and Xilinx provides our clients not only with a new level of accelerated computing made possible by the tight integration between IBM POWER processors and Xilinx FPGAs, but also gives them the ability to benefit directly from the constant stream of innovation being delivered by the expanding OpenPOWER ecosystem,” said Ken King, general manager, OpenPOWER, IBM.
Meanwhile, IBM and several fellow OpenPOWER Foundation members revealed new technologies, collaborations and developer resources to enable clients to analyze data with speed. The new offerings center on the integration of IBM’s open and licensable POWER processors with accelerators, dedicated high performance processors that can be optimized for computationally intensive software code.
