IBM and Xilinx have announced a multi-year strategic collaboration on data center applications through Xilinx FPGA-enabled workload acceleration on IBM POWER-based systems.
IBM and Xilinx, through a private signed agreement and collaboration through the OpenPOWER Foundation, are teaming to develop open acceleration infrastructures, software and middleware to address emerging applications such as machine learning, network functions virtualization (NFV), genomics, high performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics.
BM and Xilinx earlier announced a strategic collaboration to help increase the performance and energy-efficiency of data center applications.
As these heterogeneous workloads have become increasingly prevalent, data centers are turning to application accelerators to keep up with the demands for throughput and latency at low power. Xilinx All Programmable FPGAs deliver the power efficiency that makes accelerators practical to deploy throughout the data center. IBM’s open and licensable POWER architecture together with Xilinx FPGAs provide compelling performance, performance/watt and lower total cost of ownership for the next generation data centers workloads.
As part of the IBM and Xilinx strategic collaboration, IBM Systems Group developers will create solution stacks for POWER-based servers, storage and middleware systems with Xilinx FPGA accelerators for data center architectures such as OpenStack, Docker, and Spark. IBM will also develop and qualify Xilinx accelerator boards into IBM Power Systems servers.
Xilinx is developing and will release POWER-based versions of its leading software defined SDAccel Development Environment and libraries for the OpenPOWER developer community.
Additionally, IBM and Xilinx will continue to further utilize IBM’s innovative Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI) to deliver accelerated computing value to its clients. CAPI, a unique feature built into the POWER architecture, provides Xilinx and the technology industry at large with the ability to build tightly integrated, coherent solutions right on top of the POWER architecture.