Intel and University of Massachusetts Lowell pilot FPGA learning for students in the Intel® DevCloud. You can now use these resources too, for free
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted everyone’s lives in ways we could never have imagined. For example, the most basic methods of teaching and learning based on group settings are no longer easy or even possible in many locations. The challenge is to deliver high-quality instruction while dealing with the reality of group-learning restrictions. Like all educational institutions, universities are currently struggling to meet their students’ needs for remote instruction and hands-on experience without access to traditional on-campus environments or shared lab equipment. The Intel Programmable Solutions Group’s Academic Program Team decided to help its university partners by developing a new remote lab framework for FPGA development based on the existing Intel® DevCloud service, which provides remote access to servers configured with the 6th to 8th generation Intel® Core™ processors and Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Cards (Intel® FPGA PACs) based on Intel® Stratix® 10 and Intel® Arria® 10 FPGAs. The Academic Program Team added a new remote Intel FPGA Dev Kit experience to these existing Intel DevCloud resources. The Intel DevCloud also provides access to a wide variety of development tools including: Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro Edition design software ModelSim Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ software technology Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit Acceleration Stack for Intel® Xeon® CPU with FPGAs Intel® C++ Compiler In addition, the Intel DevCloud provides remote access to frameworks such as the TensorFlow machine learning library and the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK), which consists of libraries used to accelerate packet processing workloads. Last semester, the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML) and Intel piloted this newly enriched teaching framework. Dr. Yan Luo, an associate professor at UML, said: “By using the FPGA Cloud framework for remote labs, it has eliminated staff support and procurement cost to maintain the local development environment, and given us access to the latest and diverse FPGA hardware and development tools with 24x7 availability of the dev environment to students. It has also improved student productivity, flattened the learning curve of new technologies, and lowered the barrier for innovation. This has been invaluable to address the challenges of COVID-19.” Using the Intel DevCloud, graduate students studying heterogeneous computing can remotely access high-end servers based on Intel CPUs and Intel FPGA PACs to run lab exercises. Students in undergraduate labs now have access to Intel® Quartus® Prime Pro design software and can interact with Intel Dev Kits hosted remotely in the Intel DevCloud. These upgraded FPGA capabilities in the Intel DevCloud are not restricted to university students and faculty. Anyone can now access these tools and learn to use them, for free. For more information, click here. Notices & Disclaimers Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary. © Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.Terasic DE10-Agilex Accelerator PCIe board combines Intel® Agilex™ F-Series FPGA with four DDR4 SO-DIMM SDRAM sockets and two QSFP-DD connectors
If you’re itching to get your hands on the innovative features built into the new family of Intel® Agilex™ FPGAs like the second-generation Intel® HyperFlex™ architecture or the improved DSP capabilities including half-precision floating point (FP16) and BFLOAT 16 computational abilities, then consider the new Terasic DE10-Agilex Accelerator board. This PCIe card combines an Intel Agilex F-Series FPGA with four independent DDR4 SO-DIMM SDRAM sockets and two QSFP-DD connectors on a three-quarter length PCIe board. The board’s host interface is a PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 port. Each SO-DIMM memory socket accommodates 8 or 16 Gbytes of DDR4 memory, for a maximum total SDRAM capacity of 64 Gbytes, and each QSFP-DD connector accommodates Ethernet transceiver modules to 200G. The board is available with two different cooling options: a 2-slot version with integrated fans or a single-slot, passively cooled version. The Terasic DE10-Agilex Accelerator PCIe card combines an Intel® Agilex™ F-Series FPGA with four independent DDR4 SO-DIMM SDRAM sockets and two QSFP-DD connectors The Terasic DE10-Agilex PCIe board supports the Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkit, OpenCL™ BSP, and Intel® oneAPI Toolkits used for developing code for myriad high-performance workloads including computer vision and deep learning. The Intel Agilex FPGA family delivers up to 40% higher performance 1 or up to 40% lower power 1 for data center, NFV and networking, and edge compute applications. For more technical information about the Terasic DE10-Agilex Accelerator Board or to order the product, please contact Terasic directly. Notices and Disclaimers 1 This comparison based on Intel® Agilex™ FPGA and SoC family vs. Intel® Stratix® 10 FPGA using simulation results and is subject to change. This document contains information on products, services and/or processes in development. All information provided here is subject to change without notice. Contact your Intel representative to obtain the latest forecast, schedule, specifications, and roadmaps. Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary. Intel does not control or audit third-party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy. © Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.Financial Times article discusses Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation’s efforts to save coral reefs using smart underwater cameras and AI
Last week, the Financial Times published an article by Adam Green titled “Tech knowhow gives new lease of life to marine habitats.” The article discusses various efforts underway to combat the demise of sensitive marine ecosystems, especially coral reefs, and the first project discussed is the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation’s efforts to regrow and rebuild Pangatalan Island’s marine protected area in the Philippines. This project, done on conjunction with Accenture and Intel, has developed an innovative solution for recreating and restoring the island’s coral reefs to their former health that includes the addition of AI capabilities to underwater cameras that automatically capture and process tens of thousands of images of fish and other marine species to identify and monitor their migration patterns and their daily life in the reef. The Financial Times article quotes Patrick Dorsey, a Vice President in the Intel Programmable Solutions Group, who discusses the reasoning behind the creation of the automated camera system, which is both more accurate and less disruptive than human divers when used to catalog ongoing changes to the reef’s marine life. The smart underwater video cameras employ Accenture’s Video Analytics Services Platform (VASP), which provides a toolset for rapidly building and deploying AI capabilities. Accenture’s smart underwater video cameras located near the concrete scaffolds employ Accenture’s VASP, which is powered by multiple Intel technologies including Intel® Xeon® CPUs, Intel® FPGA Programmable Acceleration Cards (PACs), and the Intel® Neural Compute Stick 2 powered by the Intel® Movidius™ Myriad™ X Vision Processing Unit (VPU) and the Intel® Distribution of OpenVINO™ toolkit. For more information about the technology behind this project, see “Accenture, the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation, and Intel partner to create the CORaiL underwater vision system to help restore fragile coral reef ecosystems.” Notices and Disclaimers Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary. Intel does not control or audit third-party data. You should consult other sources to evaluate accuracy. © Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.Access leading edge Intel® FPGA Hardware and Software Development Tools for Free on the Intel® DevCloud
Now, you can get access to Intel® FPGA hardware and software development tools, for free, through a special program available on the Intel® DevCloud. These tools allow you to develop accelerated, programmable solutions and validate your workloads on leading FPGA hardware with tools optimized for Intel® technology. The program is open to Intel customers, partners, and academia. The program’s objective is to ensure your success with pre-validated SW environments and a quick start-up while providing timely support to resolve technical barriers that might shorten your time to success. Development takes place on a cluster of the latest Intel® hardware and software. Everything you need to work on your projects is included in the broad portfolio of integrated Intel® optimized frameworks, tools, and libraries available on the Intel DevCloud including the Intel® oneAPI, Intel® OpenCL™, and Intel® OpenVINO™ toolkits, the servers that run the tools, and a collection of Intel® FPGA Programmable Accelerator Cards (PACs) based on Intel® Arria® 10 and Intel® Stratix® 10 FPGAs. Registration is required for access. Click here for more information. Intel’s silicon and software portfolio empowers our customers’ intelligent services from the cloud to the edge. Notices & Disclaimers Intel technologies may require enabled hardware, software or service activation. No product or component can be absolutely secure. Your costs and results may vary. © Intel Corporation. Intel, the Intel logo, and other Intel marks are trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
