Altera SDK promises power-efficient, data centre acceleration

Altera Corp. has developed a software development kit (SDK) for Open Computing Language (OpenCL), combined with its portfolio of FPGAs and SoCs, that the company said can help designers realise high-performance, power-efficient system acceleration. According to the company, the SDK is a game-changer that offers programmers familiar with C programming a design environment that "abstracts away" the traditional FPGA development environment. It can be used to easily programme the industry's first 1.5 TFLOP-capable FPGA, Arria 10, and other Altera FPGAs and SoCs.

System designers using FPGAs can create applications that accelerate servers in the data centre and cloud to power applications, including online search and facial recognition, deep-learning neural networks, security, genomics research, video processing and many more high performance computing (HPC) applications.

FPGAs provide users with an accelerator that delivers a cost, power, and performance benefit over other solutions for scalable high-performance computing.