BittWare adds Intel Agilex FPGA-based accelerators for data-intensive compute
BittWare, a Molex company, has announced the expansion of its IA-Series of FPGA accelerators featuring Intel Agilex FPGAs. The IA-Series of FPGA accelerators are designed to help customers develop and deploy next-gen edge and cloud applications.
The IA-420F low-profile PCIe card and IA-220-U2 computational storage processor join the full size IA-840F PCIe card (introduced in November 2020) and offer developers a choice of three form factors that are popular in data centres and network infrastructures. The trio of products are PCIe Gen 4 -compliant, and include application reference designs. There is also support for the oneAPI programming model, which allows hardware developers the ability to create domain-specific FPGA platforms and application developers to build cross-architecture, single-source compilation designs.
The IA-420F low-profile PCIe card is designed to address SmartNIC and computational storage use cases. The half-height, half-length single-width PCIe card is compatible with almost all server and edge platforms and supports multiple 100G network ports for network and sensor processing applications with high data ingest requirements. It has 16-lanes of PCIe Gen 4 to provide up to twice the bandwidth normally available for FPGA-augmented systems. This makes it “compelling for data analytic workloads” says BittWare.
The IA-220-U2 computational storage processor is designed to address NVMe computational storage workloads. Conforming to the popular U.2 form factor, the IA-220-U2 features an Intel Agilex FPGA with an embedded Arm processor subsystem and support for PCIe Gen 4. The energy-efficient, flexible compute node can be deployed within conventional U.2 NVMe storage arrays and is chassis front-serviceable. The IA-220-U2 can also serve as a deployment-friendly computational storage processor within data centre platforms that have a surplus of U.2 slots, but no available PCIe slots.
The IA-840F full-size PCIe card, which was introduced in November 2020, to provide a complete family of solutions for the most demanding data center environments.
According to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020: Empowered Edge, by 2023, more than 50 per cent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud, up from less than 10 per cent in 2019.1 FPGAs play an increasing role at the edge where real-time data with critical latency, bandwidth and security requirements need to be processed efficiently. Within the cloud, FPGA heterogeneous computing solutions are required to process vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data efficiently through high-performance computing and big data analytics in order to derive value and orchestrate smart devices in the field.
The IA-420F is available with example application reference designs, including a 100GbE SmartNIC shell and support for DPDK. BittWare.com/IA-420F. The IA-220-U2 is a turnkey, ready-to-run solution for applications, such as compression, database acceleration and machine learning inference. It can be programmed by customers with in-house FPGA programming capabilities. The IA-Series can be purchased as pre-integrated Dell or HPE servers from the BittWare TeraBox range. BittWare.com/fpga/servers-systems.
