Bernhard Friebe, Senior Director of Marketing for the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel, presents the “Enabling Software Developers to Harness FPGA Compute Accelerators” tutorial at the May 2018 Embedded Vision Summit.
FPGAs play a critical part in heterogeneous compute platforms as flexible, reprogrammable, multi-function accelerators. They enable custom-hardware performance with the programmability of software. The industry trend towards software-defined hardware challenges not just the traditional architectures—compute, memory, network resources—but also the programming model of heterogeneous compute platforms. Traditionally, the FPGA programming model has been narrowly tailored and hardware-centric. As FPGAs become part of heterogeneous compute platforms and users expect the hardware to be “software-defined”, FPGAs must be accessible not just by hardware developers but by software developers, which requires the programming model of FPGAs to evolve dramatically.
This presentation focuses on outlining a highly evolved, software-centric programming model which enables software developers to harness FPGAs through a comprehensive solutions stack including FPGA-optimized libraries, compilers, tools, frameworks, SDK integration and an FPGA-enabled ecosystem. Friebe also shows a real-world example using machine learning inference acceleration on FPGAs.
