Macnica to launch Mpression OpenCL Lab enabling easy evaluation of OpenCL development environment with high-end FPGAs

YOKOHAMA, Japan (February 16, 2016) – Macnica, Inc., a leading global technical distributor for semiconductor and networking products, today announced the availability of its Mpression OpenCL Lab to Japanese customers.

The Mpression OpenCL Lab is a secure environment for users to start developing OpenCL-based acceleration projects at no charge by logging in remotely to a server with Altera high-end FPGA-based hardware and the necessary development software installed. This enables users to immediately evaluate the OpenCL development flow without any upfront investment and without the time cost associated with preparing the environment, including the Altera OpenCL SDK and FPGA development suite.

Currently, the Mpression OpenCL Lab is only available for the Japanese customer base, as the service and procedures are being full assessed. After this evaluation period, the Mpression OpenCL lab will be open to all interested users for the service.

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Rising expectations for OpenCL on FPGAs as a CPU accelerator technology

As the amount of data from smart phones and IoT devices explode, ever increasing load and power consumption have become a major issue in data centers. As one of the solutions for these issues, focus is falling on FPGAs as a key device for offloading the increasing burden on CPUs. The processing of large amounts of data can be streamlined by reconfiguring the FPGA hardware on the fly, targeting it for specific processing needs. By offloading processing transactions from CPU to FPGA, data center operators can decrease total cost of ownership through power savings, increasing processing performance per node, and by reducing additional server installation space. Additionally, use of OpenCL provides a means for software engineers to develop with FPGAs, enabling them to develop accelerator functions, which in turn significantly lowers the hurdles for securing development resources and expedites the process of development.

Application fields

  • Deep learning
  • High performance computing
  • Image processing applications (automotive, medical equipment, MFP, etc.)

Mpression OpenCL Lab server specifications and installed software

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700 processor (4 cores, 3.4GHz)
Memory: DDR4, 2133MHz 64GB
OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
Software: Quartus® Prime Standard edition v15.1.2
Altera SDK for OpenCL v15.1.2
FPGA board: BittWare Stratix V FPGA board
(Support for Arria® 10 FPGA in plan)
Security: SSL-VPN

<Mpression OpenCL lab WEB page>
http://www.m-pression.com/solutions/evaluation