Altera leverages reconfigurable logic for solutions addressing workload challenges in demanding environments.

The widespread deployment of data centers has dramatically changed the need for customized processors amid hardware constraints, prompting corresponding updates in FPGA devices.

Altera Corp. is launching reconfigurable logic technologies, which demonstrate how FPGA-based solutions can advance the capabilities of software-defined data centers and high-performance computing applications. The FPGA specialist said its chips accelerate the processing of large amounts of data on servers.

The solutions are based on the company’s Stratix V and Arria 10, and Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs, which feature its HyperFlex architecture. These are manufactured using the Intel 14nm Tri-Gate process.

Altera’s FPGAs combine reconfigurable logic with on-chip memory and DSP blocks to support the performance and flexibility requirements in data centers.

Twenty years ago, such facilities used to be basic software servers for the IT enterprise sector. Now, they are highly Internet-centric entities with cloud- and gaming-specific applications.

One of the primary difficulties in these setups is managing power and cooling. “FPGAs promise better performance per watt amid excessive power consumption in data centers,” said Jeff Waters, Altera’s business units senior vice president and general manager.

Next, data centers use intensive engines and algorithms, creating bottlenecks and starving the CPU for data. Consequently, the slow performance results in high latency. “The FPGA in a software-defined data center enables access and algorithm acceleration through a cluster of CPUs and FPGAs,” Waters added. This establishes an effective interconnect fabric, easing network and storage congestion.

Altera has already demonstrated an interconnect solution by hooking up its Stratix V FPGA to Intel’s Xeon processor using QPI. The IC is configured as the home agent and provides coprocessing for the CPU. This way, the FPGA increases computing performance significantly while reducing system costs and power requirement.

FPGAs accelerate Web services

Altera said FPGAs can deliver faster online search, image scaling and financial modeling. A case in point is Microsoft’s adoption of the IC beginning 2015 to speed up Bing search. The latter detailed this development in a research paper presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture in the US.

The semiconductor company is also collaborating with China’s Baidu on FPGAs and convolutional neural network algorithms for deep learning systems. Baidu is leveraging the Stratix V and SDK for OpenCL to simplify the implementation of parallel processing applications. “OpenCL support is a game changer and will help FPGAs penetrate the mainstream heterogeneous computing world,” said Ren Wu of Baidu Research.

Waters said the biggest challenge for the FPGA industry is broad adoption, and OpenCL could help realize this goal. Based on projections, 50 percent of data center opportunities for Altera will use OpenCL by 2016.

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