Getting Started with Alveo FPGA acceleration

Description

Compute servers in COSMOS, and cloud computing nodes in ORBIT Sandbox 9 are equipped with Alveo U200 accelerator cards (with Virtex Ultra Scale+ XCU200-2FSGD2104E FPGA). These cards can be used to accelerate compute-intensive applications such as d machine learning, and video processing. They are connected to the Intel Xeon host CPU over PCI Express® (PCIe) Gen3x16 bus.

This tutorial demonstrates how to run an accelerated FPGA kernel on the above platform. Vitis unified software platform 2019.2 is used for developing and deploying the application.

Prerequisites

In order to access the test bed, create a reservation and have it approved by the reservation service. Access to the resources is granted after the reservation is confirmed. Please follow the process shown on the COSMOS work flow page to get started.

Resources required

1 COSMOS compute server or 1 node in ORBIT SB9.

Execution

Prepare the node

• Load alveo_runtime.ndz on a reserved server/node. This image comes with XRT(Xilinx Run Time) and Alveo U200 XDMA deployment shell installed.

• Turn the node on

• Check the status

  -----------------------------------------------
  Node: node19-1.grid.orbit-lab.org       State: POWERON
  Node: node20-1.grid.orbit-lab.org       State: POWERON
  -----------------------------------------------
  

• ssh to the node

Check Alveo

• lspci
• xbutil

Run the application