FPGA Interfaces Speeding Up

IBM/Xilinx collaborate, Red Hat wants standard

By Rick Merritt, EE Times, Nov. 16, 2015 – 

IBM and Xilinx have joined the race to bring FPGA accelerators to data centers. The problem they and their competitors have yet to solve is delivering an easy-to-use standard interface for them, according to a Red Hat executive.

Jon Masters, a chief Arm architect at Red Hat, developed an FPGA accelerator called Trilby, he described at last week?s Arm Tech Con. "Ninety percent of the effort in using an FPGA accelerator is in interfacing to it -- that's crazy it should be 10% -- what I'd like to see is a standard for the industry," he said.

Today's FPGA accelerators typically require some programming in Verilog, but that's unacceptable, said Masters. A researcher at Microsoft raised a similar compliant more in an August 2014 paper describing work using FPGA accelerators in Microsoft's data centers.

Microsoft and China's Baidu are both exploring use of FPGAs on the servers, sparking interest in the area. Intel accelerated interest with its $16 billion bid in June to acquire Altera, which has led the way in moving its FPGAs to OpenCL.

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