CIE Components in Electronics
Altera Corporation has announced that the latest release of the company’s SDK for OpenCL supports IBM Power Systems servers as an OpenCL system host. Customers will now be able to develop OpenCL code that targets IBM Power Systems CPUs and accelerator boards using Altera’s FPGAs as a high-performance compute solution. According to the company FPGA users can see a 5-20X performance boost over standard CPU based servers for many applications.
In addition Altera has announced its full support of the OpenPOWER Consortium, an open development alliance that makes the IBM POWER microprocessor available under license to other companies for open collaboration and development. Altera intends to join the Consortium formally as soon as the governing documentation process is complete and membership opens.
The addition of IBM Power Systems strengthens Altera’s FPGA-based computing offering, which also includes support for all other major architectures.
OpenCL supports a wide range of applications, from embedded and consumer software to high-performance computing solutions, through a high-performance, portable abstraction. By creating an efficient, programmer-friendly interface, OpenCL forms the foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform independent tools, middleware and applications. It also improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.
“IBM’s collaboration with Altera on OpenCL and support of the IBM Power architecture with the Altera SDK for OpenCL can bring more innovation to address Big Data and cloud computing challenges,” said Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain.. “The heterogeneous computing capabilities of the Altera FPGAs and IBM Power CPUs will bring new opportunities for developers to accelerate a wide range of high-performance computing applications across industries.”
