FPGA Accelerated Applications in your web browser

FPGA Accelerated Applications in your web browser

We are living in such a strange era… 

 We have seen a 1 trillion-fold increase in processing power over the last 6 decades … and yet we are still starving for more! 

Even with the frantic pace at which our latest smartphones, tablets, and computer capabilities increase, we are still outpaced by the never-ending inflation of our computational needs. 

Thus arose the era of hardware acceleration.

By the end of the articleyou’ll be able to run hardware-accelerated algorithms from your web browser! 

GPU, DPU, NPU and FPGA are the new weapons in the computational battle but not everybody is invited to the party. 

While having their own specificities, all forms of hardware acceleration provide massive improvements in processing speed, latency and power. And all variants require adding some hardware equipments into processing systems. 

The hardware acceleration evaluation dilemma

When you’re selling applications that require hardware to run, there’s a reality you know too much: 

How can your customer evaluate the application… if one needs first to buy an expensive piece of hardware? 

A classic chicken-and-egg problem where one won’t commit to buying hardware before having validated the benefits, which requires access to hardware… 

Cloud service providers are great as they provide instant access to hardware acceleration with instances such as AWS F1, Azure NP10, AliCloud F1/F3 etc ….  

However, creating, configuring and ramping-up on a CSP account remains cumbersome for newcomers. 

Introducing TestDrive in the Xilinx App Store

Xilinx and Accelize teamed up to create a point-and-click web browser execution of hardware-accelerated apps. 

This solution gives Xilinx App Store visitors free access to ISV applications from the comfort of their web browser. 

Behind, the scenes, TestDrive leverage the Cloud Service Providers FPGA-enabled servers (AWS to start with, more to come in the coming weeks…) to run the apps.  

TestDrive performs the following operations automatically and transparently: 

  • Provision an instance with an FPGA board
  • Configure the instance 
  • Upload user input files
  • Download and run the app using Docker containers
  • Display the app console output
  • Download output results

TestDrive has already been enabled on a few Xilinx App Store product pages, and there’s more to come.

watch on-demand // Adaptive Computing – Innovation Accelerated

The Xilinx Adapt 2021 virtual technology conference features executive keynotes with appearances from partners and customers, along with a series of more than 100 presentations, forums, product trainings, and labs designed to help you unlock the value of adaptive computing for your applications.

watch on-demand // Adaptive Computing – Innovation Accelerated

116 Sessions - 134 speakers
View ADAPT SESSIONS

To learn more about TestDrive, you can take a look at the Xilinx Adapt Conference session in which it was officially announced: 

Play Video

You can also try it on your own:

And if you want to see you application listed on the Xilinx App Store: 

Become a Seller on the App Store

Contact Info

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Follow Accelize and stay informed on LinkedinTwitterFacebook and Youtube.

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By Jean-Michel Frouin on 23 September 2021