Software modules for popular AI workloads are supplied pre-loaded on powerful, configurable and heterogeneous computational engines and available through Arrow Testdrive™
Arrow Electronics, Inc. is simplifying the infusion of AI into high-performance computing with a new software platform ready to run on the BittWare 385A FPGA accelerator card. Arrow's engineering team has built ready-to-use OpenCL software modules that help users build custom engines for computationally demanding workloads in applications such as image processing or facial recognition. As an open, standardized environment for parallel programming of computer systems, specifying conventional programming languages and containing APIs, with OpenCL, users are guaranteed to be able to complete their projects quickly with familiar techniques.
Arrow's new AI platform includes a compiler, with which the user can also create their own applications if they wish. "BittWare is delighted to play an active role in Arrow's Testdrive program to help grow the FPGA acceleration market," said Craig Petrie, Vice President of Marketing at BittWare. "Our OpenCL SDK-optimized BSPs provide a familiar programming experience for software-oriented customers who want to take advantage of the performance and power efficiency improvements that can be achieved using Intel FPGA technology." The modules come pre-loaded on the accelerator card and currently include vector addition, FFT and XNUMXD FFT, edge detection, file transcoding, face detection and Sobel edge detection.
The Arrow team continues to create new features to broaden support and accelerate adoption. In addition, it is integrating popular AI frameworks such as Caffe and TensorFlow, leveraging OpenCL, to further foster a convenient and efficient infusion of AI. BittWare 385A contains the Intel® Arria® 10 1150 GX FPGA, efficiently connected to the host via PCIe Gen 3 x8 and directly to two 40Gb QSFP+ Ethernet optical interfaces for external to-board communication. Engineered for high performance, the card contains two 3-4GB DDR16 memory banks that support up to 2133 MTransf/s. The Arria 10 GX offers unprecedented heterogeneous acceleration, combining floating point DSP hard blocks with programmable logic fabric. The accelerator card includes all demos loaded and compatible with BittWare's BSP OpenCL HPC and Intel FPGA OpenCL SDK to help with development.
With Camera RealSense also loaded, it's ready to use out of the box. Arrow provides easy access to the new AI platform through its unique Testdrive™ program, which allows customers to evaluate development tools by choosing from the more than 2000 currently available—including software, hardware, and specialized hand tools—in their own facilities, free for up to 28 days. Interested customers can access the AI platform on Testdrive through Arrow's engineering and commercial teams.
