This week on the annual Supercomputing HPC present, we’re going to see plenty of high-profile enterprise bulletins throughout a big selection of industries that help server and high-performance computing environments. One such announcement is from BittWare, which is saying its new IA-840F add-in card constructed upon Intel’s newest FPGA product line. The IA-840F add-in card is a PCIe 4.zero x16 enabled machine for next-generation datacenter, networking, and edge compute workloads, supporting hardened twin QSPF-DD (4x100G) connectivity.
The objective of including an FPGA with networking connectivity to any enterprise surroundings has an a variety of benefits, corresponding to offloaded workloads, accelerated workloads, and a configurable FPGA surroundings. This permits clients to rapidly adapt to their workload necessities by implementing a reconfigured FPGA by software program. When networking is bundled into the combo, extra SmartNIC options might come into play, both adapting outgoing visitors based mostly on guidelines, or processing incoming information with out even touching the CPU in play. The push in the direction of enhanced ML-accelerated and analytical community visitors flows additionally profit from FPGA and reconfigurable acceleration.
At the guts of the IA-840F is one in every of Intel’s Agilex FPGAs. This is a rarety – we hardly ever hear about the place Intel’s Agilex {hardware} is getting used, over a yr for the reason that merchandise had been introduced into the market. Agilex is anticipated to come back in three flavors, Agilex-F, Agilex-I, and Agilex-M, with the capabilities and efficiency rising by these choices, and Agilex-F was the primary one off the road.
I used to be going to say that the IA-840F appears to be utilizing Agilex-I, as Intel’s Patrick Dorsey supplied a quote for Bittware and talked about 112G trancievers, nevertheless that appears to be a common quote concerning the household of Agilex FPGAs, not this particular product.
“Intel Agilex FPGAs and cross platform tools including the oneAPI toolkit are leading the way to enable easier access to these newest FPGAs and their tremendous capabilities – including eASIC integration, HBM integration, BFLOAT16, optimized tensor compute blocks, Compute Express Link (CXL), and 112 Gbps transceiver data rates for high speed 1Ghz compute and 400Gbps+ connectivity solutions”, stated Patrick Dorsey, VP Product, Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. “The highly customizable and heterogenous Agilex platform and oneAPI tools enable products like the new IA-840F accelerator card from BittWare to drive innovation from the edge to the cloud.”
That final bit can be an intriguing ingredient to the brand new Bittware product: help for the oneAPI unified programming surroundings. OneAPI is Intel’s grand imaginative and prescient for a singular software program platform to be used in CPU, GPU, FPGA, and AI {hardware} – whereas the higher layer is constructed on a SYCL variant of Data Parallel C++ (DPC++), the libraries beneath will likely be optimized for the {hardware} together with a {hardware} abstraction layer from the programmer. The objectives are admirable, and to date we’ve heard about oneAPI used within the context of GPUs because it pertains to Intel’s Xe graphics with our latest interview of Intel’s Lisa Pearce, however we’ve not heard a lot on the FPGA aspect. With Bittware making this announcement, it will seem that the FPGA angle is actually effectively on its method as effectively. Alongside oneAPI help, the IA-840F comes with a HDL developer toolkit, corresponding to PCIe drivers, utility instance designs, and a board administration controller. Based on the picture of the IA-840F, it appears to be like like that the unit has three DDR reminiscence slots, possible for various accelerators on the FPGA.
Customers within the IA-840F could have a selection of thermal cooling choices (passive, lively, liquid), and shipments are anticipated to start…
