Xilinx introduced a data center accelerator card and a new standards-based, API-driven clustering solution for deploying FPGAs at massive scale for high performance computing (HPC) and database workloads.
The new Alveo U55C accelerator, which is Xilinx’s most powerful Alveo accelerator card to date, delivers more parallelism of data pipelines, superior memory management, optimized data movement throughout the pipeline, and the highest performance-per-watt in the Alveo portfolio. The Alveo U55C card is a single-slot full height, half length (FHHL) form factor with a low 150W max power.
The company says the new card offers superior compute density and doubles the HBM2 to 16GB compared to its predecessor, the dual-slot Alveo U280 card. The U55C provides more compute in a smaller form factor for creating dense Alveo accelerator-based clusters. It’s built for high-density streaming data, high IO math, and big compute problems that require scale-out like big data analytics and AI applications. Leveraging RoCE v2 and data center bridging, coupled with 200 Gbps bandwidth, the API-driven clustering solution enables an Alveo network that competes with InfiniBand networks in performance and latency, with no vendor lock-in. MPI integration allows for HPC developers to scale out Alveo data pipelining from the Xilinx Vitis unified software platform.
“Scaling out Alveo compute capabilities to target HPC workloads is now easier, more efficient and more powerful than ever,” said Salil Raje, executive vice president and general manager, Data Center Group at Xilinx. “Architecturally, FPGA-based accelerators like Alveo cards provide the highest performance at the lowest cost for many compute-intensive workloads. By introducing a standards-based methodology that enables the creation of Alveo HPC clusters using a customer’s existing infrastructure and network, we’re delivering those key advantages at massive scale to any data center. This is a major leap forward for even broader adoption of Alveo and adaptive computing throughout the data center.”
CSIRO, Australia’s national research organization along with the world’s largest radio astronomy antenna array, is utilizing Alveo U55C cards for signal processing in the Square Kilometer Array radio telescope. Deploying the Alveo cards as network-attached accelerators with HBM allows for massive throughput at scale across the HPC signal processing cluster. The Alveo accelerator-based cluster allows CSIRO to tackle the massive compute task of aggregating, filtering, preparing and processing data from 131,000 antennas in real time. The 460Gbps of HBM2 bandwidth across the signal processing cluster is served by 420 Alveo U55C cards fully networked together across P4-enabled 100Gbps switches. The Alveo U55C cluster delivers processing performance with overall throughput at 15Tb/s in a compact power and cost efficient footprint. CSIRO is now completing an example Alveo reference design in order to help other radio astronomy or adjacent industries achieve the same success.
