Altera SDK for OpenCL achieves Khronos conformance for FPGAs

Achieving conformance allows Altera to provide a validated cross-platform programming environment that can be used to dramatically accelerate algorithms at significantly lower power versus alternative computer hardware architectures. Altera successfully completed more than 8500 conformance tests using its SDK for OpenCL, targeting a high-performance Stratix V FPGA, in order to attain conformance. The tests involved continuously running a Stratix V FPGA accelerator card in a server farm resulting in zero errors.

Alex Grbic, director of software, IP and DSP marketing at Altera, comments: “Our continued investment in OpenCL is enabling Altera to drive the industry toward using FPGAs for acceleration of computationally-intensive applications. Our SDK for OpenCL is used by some of the world’s leading developers of high-performance computing systems. These developers require Khronos group OpenCL conformance and Altera is the only FPGA vendor to achieve it, proving the readiness of our solution.”

It is easy for software developers to take advantage of the high-performance and low-power offered by FPGAs. Altera’s SDK for OpenCL provides an industry-standard open source programming interface and Altera’s Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL provides off-the-shelf FPGA boards that are optimized for Altera devices.

OpenCL Ray Tracer Demonstration Targeting Single-chip SoCs In addition to support for its high-performance Stratix V FPGAs, Altera developed its SDK for OpenCL to support its low-power, low-cost Cyclone V SoCs, which integrates an ARM Cortex-A9 processor into a 28 nm FPGA. Altera recently used its SDK for OpenCL to develop and demonstrate a complete heterogeneous system using a Cyclone V SoC. The demonstration shows how a ray tracing algorithm used to render 3D graphics can be accelerated using the Altera SDK for OpenCL and a Cyclone V SoC – achieving a speed up of 40X in comparison to running the same algorithm purely on a discrete ARM processor system. For software developers unfamiliar with hardware design languages, no hardware expertise is required to implement the OpenCL kernels.

The Altera SDK for OpenCL is 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 SDK for OpenCL is $995.