In the world of high performance computing (HPC), the growing trend of hardware accelerations enables higher system performance. This is accomplished by offloading non-core processing functions and system I/O management to a secondary CPU or FPGA.
While co-located HPC acceleration develops a growing acceptance in high-end servers, a number of systems leverage hardware acceleration via high speed serial busses like PCIe. In some systems, the PCIe-enabled hardware accelerators are found on the CPU motherboard. In other applications, the system leverages PCIe add-in cards targeted at data centers, network acceleration, data processing, system modeling and market analysis.
Alpha Data Enhances High Performance Computing
Denver, Colorado & Edinburgh, Scotland-based Alpha Data is a leader in this space.
They have a growing family of high performance Xilinx® FPGA based plug-in acceleration engines. Several of their new solutions leverage the high performance capabilities of the Xilinx® Kintex® Ultrascale™ and Xilinx® Virtex® Ultrascale™ FPGAs.
One example is the ADM-PCIE-8V3 which is a half-length, low profile, PCI Express® Add-In Card featuring the powerful and efficient Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale™ VU095-2 FPGA.
This card supports 16x PCIe Gen 3 and other high-speed I/O standards.
The ADM-PCIE-8V3 also supports two additional 100GbE interfaces via Samtec FireFly™ Micro Flyover System™, allowing this board to become a massive network device with 4x 100GbE ports.
Alpha Data recently confirmed the high-speed capabilities of FireFly within the ADM-PCIE-8V3.
For test set-up, an ADM-PCIE-8V3 was attached to a PCIe breakout card. Similar to the test set-up described here, Alpha Data leveraged the IBERT capabilities of the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite to configure the GTY transceivers of the Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale™ VU095-2 FPGA.
Alpha Data observed data rates of up to 28Gbps over FireFly based on eye diagrams within the Vivado Design Suite.
Another Alpha Data solution is the ADM-PCIE-8K5.
This is a half-length, low profile, PCI Express® Add-In Card featuring the powerful and efficient Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale™ KU115-2 FPGA. Our friends at Xilinx blogged about the unique capabilities of the ADM-PCIE-8K5.
It also features dual FireFly™ Micro Flyover System™ connectors offer data rates of up to 4x16Gbps per connector.
In both cases, Alpha Data chose FireFly because it offers a proven platform for supporting various high-speed protocols over copper cable assembles or active optical cable assemblies. The small size and ease of attachment also make the solution ideal for applications across the data center.
Additional Resources:
For more information on Samtec’s FireFly™ Micro Flyover System™, please visit the following resources:
