Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) today announced the availability of the SDAccel™ development environment 2015.1 for the OpenCL™ framework, C, and C++. The SDAccel development environment, part of the SDx™ family of development environments for system and software engineers, enables up to 25X performance-per-watt improvements in data center application acceleration leveraging FPGAs. This new release enhances the SDAccel Integrated Development Environment (IDE), expands OpenCL standard conformance, and expands the ecosystem of SDAccel Development Environment-certified Alliance members who provide platforms, libraries, and design services.

Enhanced SDAccel development environment

The SDAccel Development Environment 2015.1 release brings new usability enhancements to the Eclipse-based SDAccel IDE, including new debugging and profiling capabilities to accelerate the development and deployment of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels. It also extends the SDAccel Development Environment's Khronos standard compliance with the new OpenCL Installable Client Driver (ICD). This ICD extension allows multiple OpenCL implementations to coexist on the same system, giving application developers the ability to choose between CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs for runtime acceleration and power savings.

“Bitfusion maximizes the performance of existing data center applications by combining hardware accelerators with proprietary software extractors and libraries,” said Subbu Rama, CEO of Bitfusion.io, Inc. “While we can achieve ‘plug-and-play’ acceleration, we are leveraging major vendor hardware and tools to achieve high performance,” he said. “As a user of Xilinx®’s Kintex® UltraScale™ FPGAs and SDAccel development environment, we are pleased with the evolution of that environment and Xilinx’s unwavering support for demonstrating OpenCL FPGA acceleration for applications such as bioinformatics, engineering computing, search, computer vision, and media encoding.”

Expanding the ecosystem of platform, library, and design service providers

Building on the SDAccel development environment certification ecosystem announced in November 2014, Xilinx has welcomed new Alliance members offering development boards, specialized market libraries, and design services. New development boards include the Xilinx® Kintex® UltraScale™ KCU105 Evaluation Kit, the Micron Pico Computing SB-850 board with Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) support, the Alpha Data ADM-PCIE-KU3 board, and the 4DSP CES820 Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) easy-to-use embedded system.

The newly updated Xilinx optimized libraries also include OpenCV, BLAS, and machine learning deep neural network (DNN) libraries from Auviz Systems, with machine learning libraries also available from new Alliance member ArrayFire.

Arrayfire CEO John Melonakos said, “Arrayfire is known for its ‘quite fast’ software libraries in the GPU computing space. “Just a few lines of code from ArrayFire’s library can replace dozens of lines of source code, saving time and lowering development costs,” he said. “We’ve been working with Xilinx to leverage our expertise in the SDAccel development environment, and now we’re offering machine learning libraries and design services for accelerating OpenCL applications on data center FPGAs.”

In addition to accelerating end-application development of algorithms, libraries, and FPGA-based kernels, Xilinx has established a global ecosystem of Design Services Alliance members, enabling design teams worldwide to leverage FPGA-based acceleration of OpenCL, C, and C++ applications. New Design Services Alliance members include ArrayFire, Cluster Technology Limited, Impulse Accelerated Technologies, Instigate Design, ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing), and MulticoreWare, Inc.

Time of use

More information about the SDAccel development environment is available at www.xilinx.com/sdaccel. This page also features new QuickTake video tutorials, related documentation, and links to SDAccel development environment certified Alliance members. For inquiries about SDAccel development environment features, please contact your authorized Xilinx representative.

Introducing SDx

SDx™ is a family of development environments for systems and software engineers. SDx enables developers without FPGA experience to leverage the powerful performance of programmable hardware based on industry-standard processors, either on-chip or off-chip, using high-level programming languages. More information about SDx is available at www.xilinx.com/sdx.