Altera SDK for OpenCL supports IBM Power Systems

Alterahas also today announced full support for the OpenPOWER Consortium, intending to formally join as soon as the governing documentation process is complete and membership opens. The consortium is an open development alliance that makes the IBM POWER microprocessor available under license to other companies for open collaboration and development. The addition of IBM Power Systems strengthens Altera’s FPGA-based heterogeneous computing offering, which also includes support for all other major architectures.

Jeff Waters, senior vice president and general manager of the military, industrial and compute division at Altera, commented: “By combining the industry-leading performance of IBM Power Systems, along with the application acceleration capabilities of FPGAs, the Altera SDK for OpenCL gives customers an unmatched heterogeneous computing environment. The Altera SDK for OpenCL is used by some of the world’s leading developers of high-performance computing systems and data center servers, and with today’s news we are giving these customers a broader choice of computing architectures.”

With a high-performance portable abstraction, OpenCL supports a variety of applications, from embedded and consumer software to high-performance computing solutions. The foundation layer of a parallel computing ecosystem of platform independent tools, middleware and applications, OpenCL greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software. With FPGA-based system acceleration and an efficient programmer-friendly interface, the Altera SDK for OpenCL provides system designers an attractive performance per watt solution when constrained by power and cooling requirements.

“IBM’s collaboration with Altera on OpenCL and support of the IBM Power architecture with the Altera SDK for OpenCL can bring more innovation to address Big Data and cloud computing challenges. The heterogeneous computing capabilities of the Altera FPGAs and IBM Power CPUs will bring new opportunities for developers to accelerate a wide range of high-performance computing applications across industries,” comments Tom Rosamilia, Senior Vice President, IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain.

Currently available for download on Altera’s website or through the purchase of an Altera Preferred Partner OpenCL board, the annual software subscription for the Altera SDK for OpenCL is $995 (USD).