POWER8 system achieves significant improvements in system performance, efficiency, and flexibility using reprogrammable FPGA accelerators

Hong Kong, November 18, 2014 – Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled the industry's first FPGA-based accelerated platform that coherently connects FPGAs and POWER8 CPUs using IBM's CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface). This reconfigurable hardware accelerator features shared virtual memory between the FPGA and processor, significantly enhancing system performance, efficiency, and flexibility for high-performance computing (HPC) and data center applications. Altera and IBM will showcase various POWER8 systems with coherent acceleration implemented using FPGAs at SuperComputing 2014.

Through collaboration via the OpenPOWER Foundation, Altera and IBM are developing a highly flexible heterogeneous computing solution that delivers new levels of performance and efficiency to POWER8 systems. FPGA-based accelerated POWER8 systems are optimized for implementing next-generation HPC and data center applications requiring compute and processing-intensive workloads, including data compression, encryption, image processing, and search. By using CAPI to coherently connect FPGA accelerators to POWER8 processors and the main system memory fabric, the FPGA is recognized as another core on the POWER8 processor. This significantly reduces software code lines and processor cycles compared to conventional I/O-connected accelerators, shortening development time. A single FPGA-based accelerated POWER8 server can operate at industry-leading efficiency, potentially reducing data center footprint by half.

Brad McCredie, Vice President of Power Development and OpenPOWER Chair at IBM, stated: "As high-performance computing applications evolve with rapidly changing workloads, it is essential to build flexible accelerators that enable IBM POWER processors to operate more efficiently across IBM POWER systems and all OpenPOWER-compatible systems. The work Altera has implemented to deliver FPGA-based reconfigurable hardware acceleration to our POWER processors through CAPI enables software developers to build highly efficient, flexible, and performance-optimized systems."
In partnership with board partner Nallatech, Altera and IBM have developed the OpenPOWER CAPI Development Kit for POWER8, featuring Nallatech's FPGA-based 385 card, the industry's first CAPI FPGA accelerator card. This commercial development platform enables designers to begin development using CAPI on POWER8 systems. www.nallatech.com/capi.

Altera SDK for OpenCL provides developers with the resources needed to develop their own custom FPGA-based accelerators and achieve faster time-to-market and power and performance benefits. The OpenCL 2.0 specification supports shared virtual memory capabilities, enabling programmers to leverage memory shared by the host and accelerators using CAPI.

David Gamba, Senior Director of Computer and Storage Business at Altera, stated: "Our collaboration with the OpenPOWER Foundation enables us to deliver a highly flexible heterogeneous computing platform for POWER-based systems. Altera is pioneering the delivery of CAPI-based reconfigurable hardware accelerators to POWER users, supported by the OpenCL programming model. As a result, we can showcase highly optimized accelerators delivering optimal FLOP/power/cost."
SuperComputing 2014 Live Demonstrations
Altera and IBM will officially showcase POWER8 systems accelerated by FPGAs at SuperComputing 2014, including the following:

• IBM Data Engine for NoSQL: This solution significantly reduces the foundational cost of deploying NoSQL data stores. The solution includes IBM's FlashSystem 840 along with Altera's FPGAs and IBM's proprietary CAPI-enabled POWER system S822L, and the demonstration showcases server consolidation by implementing an appropriately scaled NoSQL store using a single POWER8 server in place of 24 X86 servers.
• IBM Data Engine for Analytics: This solution is a customizable infrastructure solution that integrates software optimized for big data and analytics workloads. The IBM Data Engine uses POWER8 CPUs and Altera FPGAs together to efficiently manage workloads and provide flexible and adjustable storage and computing resources.
• OpenPOWER CAPI Developer Kit for POWER8: This demonstration shows how developers can get started with FPGA-based accelerated POWER8 systems using the Nallatech OpenPOWER CAPI FPGA accelerator development kit.
About the OpenPOWER Foundation
The OpenPOWER Foundation comprises member companies including Altera, IBM, Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA, and Tyan. Through collaboration, these companies develop advanced server, networking, storage, and hardware acceleration technologies with the goal of providing developers of next-generation hyperscale and cloud data centers with broader choices and superior control and flexibility. For more information about the OpenPOWER Foundation, visit www.openpowerfoundation.org.