UKFast Launches FPGA in the Cloud
Article date: Thu, 17 Oct 2019 15:51 GMT
British cloud hosting firm UKFast today launches a new FPGA as a Service offering built around Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Cards (Intel® FPGA PAC) D5005 based on the Intel Stratix® 10 SX FPGA, the Intel PAC with Arria® 10 GX FPGA, and Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors.
FPGAs can be reprogrammed to suit different functionality requirements after manufacturing and offer incredibly powerful compute capability. FPGA as a Service can greatly reduce development and deployment costs for businesses wishing to leverage the hardware.
In the Artificial Intelligence domain, FPGAs can offer flexibility for memory-bound workloads, low-precision models, unstructured sparsity, adversarial networks, reinforcement learning, low latency and more.
The Intel FPGA PAC D5005 is the latest in a growing line of FPGA-based server-accelerator cards from Intel. Compared with the Intel PAC Arria 10 GX FPGA, the Intel FPGA D5005 accelerator card offers 3 times the amount of programmable logic, up to 4 times as much memory, and 5 times the I/O. In addition, by using the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO™ Toolkit, developers are able to go from Caffe* or TensorFlow* to hardware with no FPGA experience.
UKFast CTO Neil Lathwood said: “FPGAs are among the most expensive components you'll find in a cloud environment. We’re offering a very specialised piece of hardware and making it available as part of a flexible, scalable platform, opening up FPGAs to businesses who may not otherwise have been able to leverage the technology.
“Having direct, secure device pass-through gives our customers immediate physical access to the FPGA hardware, which they can then programme as and when they want to.”
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