BittWare extends accelerator product line

BittWare, which supplies enterprise-class accelerators for edge and cloud-computing applications, has expanded its IA-Series of FPGA accelerators featuring Intel’s Agilex FPGAs.

The IA-Series has been designed to help customers develop and deploy next-generation edge and cloud applications, providing greater flexibility and speed while reducing risk.

The IA-420F low-profile PCIe card and IA-220-U2 computational storage processor join the IA-840F to provide a choice of three form factors that have proved popular in data centre and network infrastructure. These products are fully PCIe Gen 4 compliant, and include application reference designs in addition to support for the oneAPI programming model, which allows hardware developers to create domain-specific FPGA platforms and application developers to build cross-architecture, single-source compilation designs.

According to Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020: Empowered Edge, by 2023, more than 50% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data centre or cloud, up from less than 10% in 2019. FPGAs are expected to play an increasing role at the edge where real-time data with critical latency, bandwidth and security requirements need to be processed efficiently.

Within the cloud, FPGA heterogeneous computing solutions have to be able to process vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data efficiently through high-performance computing and big data analytics in order to derive value and orchestrate smart devices in the field.

The IA-420F low-profile PCIe card is designed to address SmartNIC and computational storage use cases and this half-height, half-length single-width PCIe card is compatible with almost all server and edge platforms.

The IA-420F is able to support multiple 100G network ports for network and sensor processing applications with high data ingest requirements. A full 16-lanes of PCIe Gen 4 provides customers with up to twice the bandwidth normally available for FPGA-augmented systems, thereby making it compelling for data analytic workloads.

The IA-220-U2 computational storage processor is designed to address NVMe computational storage workloads. Conforming to the popular U.2 form factor, it features an Intel Agilex FPGA with an embedded ARM processor subsystem and support for PCIe Gen 4. This compute node can be deployed within conventional U.2 NVMe storage arrays and is chassis front-serviceable. The IA-220-U2 also can serve as a deployment-friendly computational storage processor within data center platforms that have a surplus of U.2 slots, but no available PCIe slots.

The IA-420F and IA-220-U2 join the IA-840F full-size PCIe card, which was introduced in 2020, to provide a complete family of solutions for the most demanding data center environments.