Integrating an Alveo Card
Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing the integration of Accolade FPGA IP onto Xilinx Alveo Accelerator cards. A common question we get is: How do I integrate an Alveo adapter into my appliance and with my host application?
The answer is fairly straightforward. The Alveo card utilizes a standard PCIe slot (or two in the case of the U280) so is compatible with any industry-standard Intel server. The cards vary in size but as long as you have a full length PCIe slot available there is no problem accommodating any Alveo card.
As for the host application (i.e. security or network monitoring), it must be able to communicate with the card via a well-defined API. The API is documented and provided by Accolade as a software development kit (SDK) with various procedures to manipulate the card such as for setup, defining an action, or reading data from the card. The good news is that once a host application has been modified to interact with any Alveo (or Accolade ANIC adapter) card then the exact same API calls can be used to interface with other adapters.
We should note that if your application uses PF_RING or is Suricata based then there are adapter interface options that do not require direct use of the Accolade API.
To learn more about how easy it is to integrate your application with Accolade FPGA IP, please contact us at inquire@accoladetechnology.com.