Barco partners with Accelize to enable encryption-as-a-service

Accelize brings a paradigm shift to the FPGA and Cloud industry with its QuickPlay & QuickStore products, and by nurturing an Ecosystem of IP providers and FPGA accelerator developers, who can sell their products through QuickStore in a pay per use manner (i.e. with no high upfront costs, unlike the traditional IP business model).

FPGA accelerator developers use QuickPlay to create and customise such accelerators seamlessly and efficiently regardless of their FPGA expertise. For this, they combine highly optimised IP cores – from a growing catalog of FPGA IP cores provided by the QuickAlliance members – with their own custom functions written in C/C++.

These accelerators can then be deployed on premise or as a service on Cloud Service Providers’ instances. The pool of available functionality will now also include IP cores from Barco Silex, beginning with encryption, but soon to include other security functions and video processing. Barco Silex thereby joins the growing number of providers of high-quality IP cores in the QuickAlliance Ecosystem.

“The tidal wave of Acceleration of Cloud Services using FPGAs is coming upon the industry fast and Accelize is uniquely positioned to address it.” says Stephane Monboisset Director of Marketing and Business Development at Accelize.

“Barco Silex is known worldwide for the quality of its security and video IP cores, and having Barco Silex join Accelize on this journey not only enables Accelize to address the growing demand for security solutions, but also plays as testimony to the quality of the ecosystem that we are building with the QuickAlliance.”

The partnership opens up great opportunities in the domain of FPGA Acceleration-as-a-Service (FAaaS), where Cloud Service Providers operate FPGA accelerators in the cloud to run compute-intensive tasks such as deep learning, big data analytics, database management, video processing and more.

The OVH group, e.g., already offers FAaaS on its RunAbove servers, with FPGA accelerators that can be configured using the Accelize framework. Cloud users have the choice between a number of pre-built Accelerators, or they can build their own using QuickPlay and QuickStore.

With the partnership between Barco Silex and Accelize, they can now also configure and set up Encryption-as-a-Service (EaaS). The encryption will be initially based upon the acclaimed AES GCM IP of Barco Silex, providing authenticated encryption at speeds of up to 100Gbps with very low latency.

Thierry Watteyne, CEO of Barco Silex says that his company is really excited by the partnership with Accelize: “QuickPlay makes it easy for companies, even if they have little or no FPGA experience, to integrate our IP blocks into their FPGA designs, strongly extending the reach of our IP cores".

"But on top, this partnership brings us squarely into the promising world of cloud-based FPGA services, where our IP can be run and monetised as a service. This is a true paradigm shift in the IP business model and thus a significant opportunity for us.”

Accelize welcomes IP providers to join the QuickAlliance ecosystem, to provide the most comprehensive high quality IP offering, and take part into the revolution that Cloud computing represents for the FPGA industry.