BittWare expands its IA Series accelerator product line based on Intel Agilex FPgas

BittWare, a Molex company and a leading provider of enterprise-class accelerators for edge and cloud computing applications, announced the expansion of its IA-series FPGA accelerators with Intel Agilex FPgas. BittWare's IA Series FPGA accelerators are designed to help customers develop and deploy next-generation edge and cloud computing applications with greater flexibility and compute speed while reducing risk.

The new IA-420F ultra-thin PCIe card and IA-220-U2 Compute storage processor join the IA-840F, offering three common sizes to choose from for data centers and network infrastructure. All three products are fully PCIe Gen 4 compliant and, in addition to supporting the oneAPI™ programming model, include application reference designs that enable hardware developers to create domain-specific FPGA platforms and application developers to build cross-architecture, single-source compiled designs.

Craig Petrie, vice president of Sales and Marketing at BittWare, said: "BittWare is excited to leverage Intel's Agilex technology to support three of the most prevalent accelerator sizes used in data centers and network infrastructure. "As part of Molex, we are uniquely positioned to drive technological innovation in enterprise-class products, which enables our customers to deploy Intel Agilex FPGA-based solutions at the card and server levels with reduced risk and cost."

According to Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020: Empowered Edge, more than 50 percent of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud by 2023, up from less than 10 percent in 2019. [1] FPgas are playing an increasingly important role in edge computing that requires efficient processing of real-time data with critical latency, bandwidth, and security requirements. In cloud computing, FPGA heterogeneous computing solutions are needed to efficiently process large volumes of structured and unstructured data through high-performance computing and large data analytics to capture value and coordinate smart devices in the field.

The extended accelerator family increases deployment flexibility

The new IA-420F ultra-thin PCIe card is designed to address SmartNIC and compute storage usage. This half-height, half-length, single-width PCIe card is compatible with almost all servers and edge platforms. The IA-420F supports multiple 100G network ports and is suitable for network and sensor processing applications with high data ingestion requirements. The full 16-way PCIe Gen 4 provides customers with twice the bandwidth typically used for FPGA-enhanced systems, making it ideal for data analysis work.

The IA-220-U2 Compute Storage processor is designed to address NVMe compute storage workloads. The IA-220-U2 conforms to the popular U.2 form factor, features an Intel Agilex FPGA and embedded ARM processor subsystem, and supports PCIe Gen 4. This energy-efficient, flexible compute node can be deployed in a traditional U.2 NVMe storage array and can be serviced at the front of the case. The IA-220-U2 can also act as a deployable compute storage processor in data center platforms with a surplus of U.2 slots but no available PCIe slots.

The IA-420F and IA-220-U2, together with the IA-840F full-size PCIe card launched in November 2020, provide a complete family of solutions for the most demanding data center environments.

Deepali Trehan, vice president of Intel's Data Platforms Group and general manager of product marketing for the Programmable Solutions Group, said: "Intel Agilex FPGas are delivering industry-leading performance and power efficiency and providing customers with the adaptability and agility to innovate for different workloads across 5G, networking, cloud and edge through cross-platform tools, including the oneAPI™ toolkit." BittWare and Molex, both members of Intel's Partner Alliance program, solve some of the toughest data-centric computing, networking and storage challenges. "By leveraging Intel Agilex FPGas and oneAPI™ toolkits, BittWare can successfully help enterprise customers transition from proof-of-concept to volume deployment while addressing qualification, validation, lifecycle management and support requirements."