Removing the Barrier for FPGA-Based OpenCL Data Center Servers

By Devadas Varma and Tom Feist, Xilinx - Xcell Daily Blog, May. 20, 2015 – 

Mission-critical enterprise servers often use specialized hardware for application acceleration, including graphics processing units (GPUs) and digital signal processors (DSPs). Xilinx?s new SDAccel development environment removes programming as a gating issue to FPGA utilization in this application by providing developers with a familiar CPU/GPU-like environment.

Public clouds such as Amazon Web services, Google Compute, Microsoft Azure, Facebook and China?s Baidu have huge repositories of pictures and require very fast image recognition. In one implementation, Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer processors into an entity that they turned loose on the Internet to learn on its own. The research is representative of a new generation of computer science that is exploiting the availability of huge clusters of computers in giant data centers.

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