European cloud provider
OVH and FPGA experts Accelize have formed a partnership. OVH has headquarters in Roubaix, France and was established in 1999. The company provides a range of services including web hosting, domain name registration, dedicated servers and Virtual Private Server (VPS) packages. The company is also a leader in cloud-based solutions. Accelize, a PLDA Group company, specializes in enabling technology companies to “build and deploy FPGA accelerators quickly, seamlessly and without FPGA expertise”. The partnership will “better enable OVH’s cloud customers to leverage the processing capabilities of FPGAs in the form of FPGA Acceleration-as-a-Service”.
A Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA) uses a hardware description language (HDL) to specify configurations that use logic blocks to perform sophisticated combinational functions. They have increasingly been adopted for use in data centers over recent years. OVH launched its ‘RunAbove Lab’ FPGA server in 2016 to allow its customers to rent a dedicated FPGA Server and evaluate FPGA capabilities. As a partner of Accelize, OVH customers can operate customizable pre-built FPGA accelerators on the RunAbove FPGA servers. If required, they can customize create new accelerators using Accelize’s QuickPlay/QuickStore solution without in depth FPGA knowledge.
“We see 2017 as the year of the FPGA in data centers, and we know that many of our customers are interested in these devices and the acceleration capability they bring,” explained OVH’s Technical Director, Germain Masse. “However, we also know from experience that developing FPGA accelerators is a challenging task for many who would like to use them. Accelize’s offering addresses this perfectly with a complete, high-level tool flow for development plus an ecosystem of experienced developers who can offer pre-built accelerators to our customers.”
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