Tiny Alveo U50 Accelerator Card Makes a Big Splash
Last week was an exciting one at Xilinx with the launch of the Alveo U50 accelerator card, the industry's first low-profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen 4 support. At approx. 7 inches by 2 inches, the Alveo U50 packs a powerful punch in a small package.
It includes HBM2 high-bandwidth memory, 100 gigabits per-second of network connectivity and our UltraScale+ FPGA, all in a half-height, half-length design – small enough to fit in your pocket! But this tiny card packs a big punch. The Alveo U50 can supercharge a broad range of critical compute, network and storage workloads across on-premise and cloud data centers and runs at just 75 watts!
The Alveo U50 card was on full display at the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) in Santa Clara, Calif., as well as AMD’s EPYC 7002 (codenamed “Rome”) CPU launch in San Francisco.
In the heart of Silicon Valley at FMS, we demonstrated the advantages of the Xilinx platform in a range of computational storage solutions. As an example, one demonstration showcased Hadoop acceleration by running solution partner Eideticom’s NoLoad Computational Storage Processor (CSP) on an AMD EPYC-based server accelerated using our Alveo U50. The NoLoad CSP using Alveo accelerates both compression and erasure coding, making it the ideal solution to run MapReduce workloads. The result is more than 2X the throughput and 30 percent lower system cost when compared to a standard solution.
Up the road at the AMD event, we showcased the Alveo U50 accelerating big data analytics on an AMD EPYC Gen2 “Rome” server by running a hyper acceleration layer from another Alveo partner, Bigstream. The demo, running Alveo’s integrated PCIe Gen4, highlighted the ability to greatly improve data-intensive Apache Spark database queries, increasing user productivity by 7-fold.
The Alveo U50 adaptable accelerator card with an AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” server running Eideticom’s NoLoad CSPThe judges agreed – in the form of an FMS 2019 Best of Show Award! The Alveo U50 and Eideticom’s NoLoad CSP took home the award for Most Innovative Flash Memory Technology in the Computational Storage category!
The Alveo U50 and Eideticom’s NoLoad CSP took home an FMS 2019 Best of Show AwardSince the launch of the Alveo portfolio in October 2018, we have seen the demand for our compute acceleration solutions continue to expand. To meet that demand in less than a year, we’ve grown our ecosystem of published applications by 2-fold and the number of developers trained on the Alveo platform by 4-fold. As we continue to build out solution stacks with a growing ecosystem of application partners, we will deliver previously unthinkable capabilities to a range of industries. Just look at this tiny, yet powerful card, and know that we have much more in store.
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