Red Hat Drives FPGAs, ARM Servers

FPGA summit set for March
Rick Merritt, EETimes
2/12/2016 07:50 AM EST

SANTA CLARA, Calif.—FPGA vendors and users will meet next month in an effort to define a standard software interface for accelerators. The meeting is being convened by Red Hat’s chief ARM architect, who gave an update (Wednesday) on efforts to establish ARM servers.

“There’s a trend towards high-level synthesis so an FPGA programmer can write in OpenCL up front but the little piece that’s been ignored is how OpenCL talks to Linux,” said Jon Masters, speaking at the Linley Data Center event here.

OS companies don’t ship drivers for OpenCL, so software developers need to understand the intimate details of the FPGA as well as the Linux kernel to make the link. Often it also involves developing a custom direct-memory access engine and fine tuning Java libraries.

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