Altera joins IBM OpenPOWER Foundation

27th March 2014

Altera Europe

Nat Bowers

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An open development alliance based on IBM's POWER microprocessor architecture, Altera joins the IBM OpenPOWER Foundation. The company will collaborate with IBM and other members to develop high-performance compute solutions integrating IBM POWER CPUs with Altera’s FPGA-based acceleration technologies for use in next-generation data centres.

FPGAs provide POWER users configurable hardware accelerators in the core compute complex that help system architects reduce operating expenses by achieving very high performance at lower power. IBM and Altera have already worked together to create a coherent interface between the POWER8 processor and Altera’s Stratix V FPGAs. This collaboration provides developers a roadmap to use the high-performance capabilities of Altera’s Arria 10 and Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs in next-generation POWER-bases systems. Leveraging the Altera SDK for OpenCL, developers are able to integrate IBM Power CPUs with Altera FPGAs as a high-performance compute solution.

The OpenPOWER Foundation includes a group of industry-leading companies working together to develop high-performance compute solutions based on the IBM POWER architecture. OpenPOWER Foundation members include Altera, IBM, Google, Mellanox, NVIDIA, Samsung Electronics, Suzhou PowerCore Technology and Tyan. Together, the companies are building advanced server, networking, storage and hardware-acceleration technologies aimed at delivering more choice, control and flexibility to developers of next-generation hyperscale and cloud data centres.

Jeff Waters, Senior Vice President, Military, Industrial and Computing, Altera, comments: “The OpenPOWER Foundation will greatly increase the rate of innovation by giving developers an expanded and open set of technologies that will power the next generation of big data and cloud computing applications. Collaborating with IBM and other OpenPower Foundation members enables us to proliferate the use of FPGAs in a wide range of high-performance computing applications.”

“We are excited Altera will be collaborating with us on the IBM POWER architecture by providing OpenCL and its powerful FPGAs to the OpenPOWER development community,” said Bradley McCredie, IBM Fellow. “This foundation will benefit greatly from Altera’s FPGAs enabling a wide set of customised server, networking and storage hardware for future data centres and cloud computing.”