Altera Corporation today announced its SDK for OpenCL is conformant to the OpenCL 1.0 standard and is now included on the Khronos Group list of OpenCL conformant products. Altera is the only company to offer an FPGA-optimized OpenCL solution, allowing software developers to harness the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA for system acceleration. Altera will demonstrate its OpenCL solutions at the 2013 Linley Processor Conference, being held October 16-17 in Santa Clara, Calif.

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. To become conformant, Altera successfully completed more than 8500 conformance tests using its SDK for OpenCL, targeting a high-performance Stratix® V FPGA. The tests involved continuously running a Stratix V FPGA accelerator card in a server farm resulting in zero errors.

“Our continued investment in OpenCL is enabling Altera to drive the industry toward using FPGAs for acceleration of computationally-intensive applications,” said Alex Grbic , director of software, IP and DSP marketing at Altera. “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.”

Software developers can easily take advantage of the high-performance, low-power that FPGAs offer. 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. A list of preferred board partners, as well as a variety of design examples that demonstrate the advantages of using FPGAs in high-performance systems, can be found at www.altera.com/opencl.

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.

Altera SDK for OpenCL at Linley Processor Conference

Altera will demonstrate its OpenCL solutions at the 2013 Linley Tech Processor Conference, being held October 16-17 in Santa Clara, Calif. Altera's participation includes a presentation titled “Implementing Deep Packet Inspection Using OpenCL Channels” that will show how to express a DPI application using OpenCL with Altera FPGAs. Altera will also  demonstrate its SDK for OpenCL solutions to attendees.

Pricing and Availability

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 . For additional information please visit the OpenCL section on Altera's website.

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