Xilinx’s New Alveo HPC Accelerator Is Its ‘Most Powerful’ Yet
Summary
Xilinx said its new Alveo U55C is its “most powerful” accelerator card yet, bringing more compute density and high-bandwidth memory to high-performance computing and database workloads in a “slimmer, more efficient” design that enables “superior performance-per-watt.” The San Jose, Calif.-based FPGA maker — which AMD is in the process of acquiring for $35 billion — launched the new accelerator card during the SC21 supercomputing conference on Monday, positioning the Alveo U55C as a more efficient and flexible alternative to CPUs and GPUs for a “broad spectrum of customers” running HPC and big data workloads. “And all of this means less movement between data and buffers and memory and caches and, ultimately, better performance-per-watt.” While Xilinx did not share comparisons with GPUs, Chang said a node with eight Alveo U55C cards can perform work in Ansys’ LS-DYNA crash simulation software five times faster than a CPU-based node with Intel’s Xeon Platinum 8260L CPUs. The company did not provide configuration details for the comparison, but Chang said there are significant financial implications with such a speed boost. Alexey Stolyar, CTO of International Computer Concepts, a Northbrook, Ill.-based server integrator, told CRN that the one of the hurdles companies like Xilinx face in introducing new kinds of accelerators is the fact that customers need to switch to new toolsets to use them. That may not be a big deal for larger companies, but it could impede smaller firms from adopting new accelerator types faster, according to Stolyar.