Xilinx, Inc. announced it is establishing Xilinx Adaptive Compute Clusters (XACC) at four prestigious universities. The XACCs provide critical infrastructure and funding to support novel research in adaptive compute acceleration for high performance computing (HPC). The scope of the research is broad and encompasses systems, architecture, tools, and applications.

The XACCs will be equipped with the latest Xilinx hardware and software technologies for adaptive compute acceleration. Each cluster is specially configured to enable some of the world’s foremost academic teams to conduct state-of-the-art HPC research.

The first of the XACCs is installed at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. XACCs will follow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). A fourth cluster is being set up at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The XACCs are composed of high-end servers, Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards and high speed networking. Each Alveo card has two connections to a 100Gbps network switch to allow exploration of arbitrary network topologies for distributed computing.

The high-end servers are equipped with the latest Xilinx software including Vitis, a unified software platform for software engineers, AI researchers, and data scientists who want to exploit adaptive compute acceleration. All four XACCs are expected to be operational within the next three months. They will be expanded with the newest 7nm Versal Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP) in a future deployment.

Xilinx invites leading academics to join the XACC program and collaborate on HPC research on clusters equipped with the latest Xilinx adaptive compute acceleration technologies. Partner research teams will be able to remotely access the clusters’ computing resources to carry out their own research in adaptive computing. The XACCs will also act as a community hub for researchers to come together to collaborate with other experts in the field, including Xilinx in-house research groups.

Researchers who would like to participate in the XACC program are invited to contact the Xilinx University Program (XUP) to learn more and apply for access to the XACC hardware. 

See www.xilinx.com/university for more details.