Accelerator board for data centre applications

A PCIe form factor accelerator board from Achronix is said to be the highest single FPGA memory bandwidth PCIe add-in card designed for high speed data centre acceleration applications.

Called Accelerator-6D, the board centres on a Speedster 22i HD1000 FPGA with 700,000 look-up tables that connects to six independent memory controllers, allowing for up to 192Gbyte of memory and a memory bandwidth of 690Gbit/s.

“Accelerator-6D offers a unique proposition to the data centre, high-performance compute market segment that uses PCIe add-in cards,” said Steve Mensor, Achronix’ VP of marketing. “It offers the highest memory bandwidth for an FPGA-based PCIe form factor board – and memory bandwidth is typically the bottleneck in high performance computer systems.”

The board has six independent DRAM ports connected to the FPGA. Each port can be configured with up to 32Gbyte of DDR3 memory. Four QSFP+ modules support 4x 40G Ethernet, allowing data centre architects to develop intelligent network interface cards for network function virtualisation, network acceleration or network security.