Convey Releases OpenPOWER™ CAPI Developer Kit for Xilinx FPGAs

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Convey Computer

Mar 17, 2015, 09:10 ET


Richardson, Texas (PRWEB) March 17, 2015 -- Convey Computer, the leader in hybrid-core computing, today announced the availability of a CAPI Developer Kit for Convey’s Eagle line of coprocessors. The kit gives developers of data intensive applications on POWER8 servers an innovative means to increase performance by offloading compute intensive kernels to custom processing engines implemented in Xilinx Virtex®-7 FPGAs.

The Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) on IBM POWER8 systems improves system level performance through the integration of acceleration hardware into the cache coherence fabric of Power8 processors. Hardware kernels on the accelerator board access system memory coherently using virtual addressing; the CAPI hardware routines handle translation of addresses and implement the cached coherence protocol. This approach provides a simple programming paradigm while delivering the performance benefits of application specific hardware.

“Today’s data intensive applications require innovative solutions delivering unprecedented levels of performance and power efficiency,” stated Bruce Toal, CEO of Convey. “Through our membership in the OpenPOWER™ Foundation, we have teamed with IBM and Xilinx to offer the Convey CAPI Developer Kit, leveraging the high performance of POWER8 processors and Xilinx FPGAs in a tightly integrated, coherent platform.”

At the heart of Convey’s Eagle CAPI Developer Kit, Xilinx All Programmable Virtex-7 FPGAs provide industry-leading system performance and capacity. These devices enable compute intensive acceleration and address the insatiable demand for data center infrastructure, bandwidth and logic capacity.

“The Convey CAPI Developers Kit is yet another example of innovation through the OpenPOWER ecosystem,” said Ivo Bolsens, Xilinx CTO. “Together with Convey and IBM, Xilinx continues to further enable software engineers to achieve substantial performance increases and power reductions for compute and data intensive applications.”

This initial version of the Convey CAPI Development Kit for Xilinx FPGAs is based on Convey’s Eagle line of coprocessors, which combine Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGAs with large on-board memory in a PCIe form factor card. Each Eagle coprocessor incorporates a Xilinx XC7VX980T FPGA, providing 979,200 logic cells, 54,000 block RAMs, and 3600 DSPs for massively parallel designs. The cards support up to 32GB of ECC protected memory on four DDR3 channels, providing the bandwidth and capacity for data intensive kernels.

About Convey Computer Corporation
Convey breaks power, performance and programmability barriers with the world’s first hybrid-core computer—a system that marries the low cost and simple programming model of a commodity system with the performance of a customized hardware architecture. Using the Convey hybrid-core technology, customers worldwide in industries such as life sciences, research, big data, and the government/military are enjoying order of magnitude performance increases. http://www.conveycomputer.com/

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Alison Golan, Convey Computer, http://www.conveycomputer.com, +1 904-230-3369, [email protected]