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50 l New-Tech Magazine Europe
ith the rise of the Internet
of Things and Big Data
processing, the need for transferring
and processing data has skyrocketed,
and CPUs alone can no longer address
the exponential increase. Adding
more processors and more virtual
machines to run a given application
just doesn’t cut it, as there is only
so much that can be parallelized on
multiple CPUs for a given application.
Field-programmable gate arrays, on
the other hand, have the requisite
I/O bandwidth and processing power,
not only from a pure processing
standpoint but, equally important,
from a power standpoint. For data-
center equipment manufacturers,
the use of FPGAs has long been an
appealing prospect. Intel’s recent
acquisition of the second-largest
FPGA vendor is further testament that
a CPU-only solution no longer suffices.
The major roadblock to more-
widespread FPGA adoption has been
the complexity of implementing them.
Until now, the only way to develop
an application on an FPGA-based
platform has been to deal with some
of the lowest levels of hardware
implementation. This has kept a large
potential customer base-software
developers-away from the devices and
has made life increasingly complicated
for traditional FPGA designers.
Recent methodologies for FPGA
design, centered on high-level
synthesis (HLS) tools and leveraging
software programming languages
such as OpenCL™, C and C++, have
provided a sandbox for software
developers to reap the benefits of
FPGA-based hardware acceleration
in numerous applications. But the
methodologies often fall short in one
essential respect: enabling software
developers to define and configure, on
their own, the hardware infrastructure
best suited for their application. The
industry has continued to pursue the
holy grail of a high-level workflow for
implementing applications on FPGA-
based platforms that does not require
specific FPGA expertise.
Over the past five years, PLDA has
developed just such a workflow. Called
QuickPlay, it efficiently addresses the
implementation complexity challenge
and enables multiple use models for
FPGA development. But one of its
core sources of value is the way in
which it lets software developers take
applications intended for CPUs and
implement them, partially or fully, on
FPGA hardware. QuickPlay leverages
all of the FPGA resources, turning
these powerful but complex devices
into software-defined platforms that
yield the benefits of FPGAs without
the pain of hardware design.
Consider a software algorithm that can
be broken down into two functions:
W
A Novel Approach to Software-Defined FPGA
Computing
Stephane Monboisset
,
QuickPlay