Xilinx Vitis Unified Software Platform

FPGAs provide significant advantages in throughput, latency, and energy efficiency for implementing low-latency, compute-intensive applications when compared to general-purpose CPUs and GPUs. Over the last decade, FPGAs have evolved into highly configurable SoCs with on-chip CPUs, domain-specific programmable accelerators, and flexible connectivity options. Recently, Xilinx introduced a new heterogeneous compute architecture, the Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform (ACAP), with significantly more flexibility and performance to address an evolving set of new applications such as machine learning. This advancement on the device side is accompanied by similar advances on higher-level programming approaches to make FPGAs and ACAPs significantly easy to use for a wide range of applications. Xilinx Vitis Unified Software Platform is a comprehensive development environment to build and seamlessly deploy accelerated applications on Xilinx platforms including Alveo cards, FPGA-instances in the cloud, and embedded platforms. It addresses the three major industry trends: the need for heterogenous computing, applications that span cloud to edge to end-point, and AI proliferation. Vitis supports application programming using C, C++ and OpenCL, and it enables the development of large-scale data processing and machine learning applications using familiar, higher-level frameworks such as TensorFlow and SPARK. To facilitate communication between the host application and accelerators, Xilinx Runtime library (XRT) provides APIs for accelerator life-cycle management, accelerator execution management, memory allocation, and data communication between the host application and accelerators. In addition, a rich set of performance-optimized, open-source libraries significantly ease the application development. Vitis AI, an integral part of Vitis, enables AI inference acceleration on Xilinx platforms. It supports industry's leading deep learning frameworks like Tensorflow and Caffe, and offers a comprehensive suite of tools and APIs to prune, quantize, optimize, and compile pre-trained models to achieve the highest AI inference performance on Xilinx platforms. This talk provides an overview of Vitis and Vitis AI development environments.