Xilinx announces expansion
of Alveo portfolio
X
ilinx, a leader in adaptive and intelligent computing, has
expanded its Alveo data centre accelerator card portfolio
with the launch of the Alveo U50.
The U50 card is a low profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe
Gen 4 support, uniquely designed to supercharge a broad range
of critical compute, network and storage workloads, all on one
reconfigurable platform.
The Alveo U50 provides customers with a programmable low
profile and low-power accelerator platform built for scale-out
architectures and domain-specific acceleration of any server
deployment, on-premise, in the cloud and at the Edge. To
meet the challenges of emerging dynamic workloads such as
cloud microservices, Alveo U50 delivers between 10 to 20x
improvements in throughput, latency and power efficiency.
For accelerated networking and storage workloads, the U50
card helps developers identify and eliminate latency and data
movement bottlenecks by moving compute closer to the data.
Powered by the Xilinx UltraScale+ architecture, the Alveo
U50 card is the first in the Alveo portfolio to be packaged in
a half-height, half-length form factor and low 75-Watt power
envelope. The card features high-bandwidth memory (HBM2),
100 gigabit per second (100 Gbps) networking connectivity
and support for the PCIe Gen 4 and CCIX interconnects. By
fitting into standard PCIe server slots and using one-third the
power, the Alveo U50 significantly expands the scope in which
adaptable acceleration can be deployed to unlock dramatic
throughput and latency improvements for demanding
compute, network and storage workloads.
From Machine Learning inference, video transcoding and data
analytics to computational storage, electronic trading and
financial risk modelling, the Alveo U50 brings programmability,
flexibility and high throughput and low latency performance
advantages to any server deployment.
Unlike fixed architecture alternatives, the software and hardware
programmability of the Alveo U50 allows customers to meet
ever-changing demands and optimise application performance as
workloads and algorithms continue to evolve.
www.intelligentdatacentres.com
• • Deep Learning inference acceleration (speech translation):
delivers up to 25x lower latency, 10x higher throughput and
significantly improved power efficiency per node compared to
GPU-only for speech translation performance;
• • Data analytics acceleration (database query): running the
TPC-H Query benchmark, Alveo U50 delivers 4x higher
throughput per hour and reduced operational costs by 3x
compared to in-memory CPU2;
• • Computational storage acceleration (compression): delivers
20x more compression/decompression throughput, faster
Hadoop and Big Data analytics, and over 30% lower cost per
node compared to CPU-only nodes3;
• • Network acceleration (electronic trading): delivers 20x lower
latency and sub-500ns trading time compared to CPU-only
latency of 10us4;
• • Financial modelling (grid computing): running the Monte Carlo
simulation, Alveo U50 delivers 7x greater power efficiency
compared to GPU-only performance for a faster time to
insight, deterministic latency and reduced operational costs.
“Ever-growing demands on the data centre are pushing existing
infrastructure to its limit, driving the need for adaptable solutions
that can optimise performance across a broad range of workloads
and extend the lifecycle of existing infrastructure, ultimately
reducing TCO,” said Salil Raje, Executive Vice President and
General Manager, Data Center Group, at Xilinx.
“The new Alveo U50 brings an optimised form factor and
unprecedented performance and adaptability to data centre
workloads, and we continue to build out solution stacks with a
growing ecosystem of application partners to deliver previously
unthinkable capabilities to a range of industries.” ◊
Issue 07
57
The 8GB of HBM2 delivers over 400 Gbps data transfer speeds
and the QSFP ports provide up to 100 Gbps network connectivity.
The high-speed networking I/O also supports advanced
applications like NVMe-oF solutions (NVM Express over Fabrics),
disaggregated computational storage and specialised financial
services applications.
Alveo U50 accelerated solutions deliver significant customer
value across a range of applications, including: