Most of us are still meeting with our co-workers via online video conferencing after the paradigm shift caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.  You are probably not thinking much of what it takes to stream all the content and feeds from your meetings.  But if you’re a data center operator you probably haven’t been getting a lot of sleep over the past year worrying about how to handle the unprecedented pandemic surge in video traffic.

We’re excited to announce that Xilinx recently joined the Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) to help drive the effort to extend Confidential Computing into accelerators and SmartNIC. Before we dive into the details on why we joined the consortium, perhaps we should explain what Confidential Computing is, and what companies make up the Confidential Computing Consortium.

This week at the SC20 virtual conference, Xilinx is presenting a technology demonstration showcasing the integration of Xilinx Alveo accelerator cards with the AMD ROCm™ open software platform.

Technological innovations and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing the healthcare industry. To accelerate this trend, we’ve collaborated with NTT Disruption to develop an innovative Virtual Patient Observation (VPO) solution that detects and predicts patient actions and movements that could result in high-risk situations and automatically alerts doctors or nurses. The smart hospital solution is designed to improve the quality of patient care and overall experience while also making healthcare practitioners’ daily work easier and more efficient.

Computational storage continues to gain attention as the performance benefits of processing data near where the data resides has been well established.  Industry momentum is building and organizations like the Storage Networking Industry Association, or SNIA, are helping to define the how, what, where, and why of computational storage through the Compute, Memory, and Storage Initiative. 

In the last five years there has been unprecedented traction for FPGAs to accelerate a wide range of enterprise and research applications in areas as diverse as genomics, AI inference, large-scale business analytics, in-house EDA, and video transcoding, among others.

Today, service providers are increasingly rolling out real-time services that rely on AI and instantaneous response times, which are ideally suited for FPGA-based acceleration. 

We’re excited to have inked Ingram Micro as a primary channel distributor for Alveo data center accelerator cards.

Our strong momentum in the data center and with China’s leading server vendors continues with Huawei‘s recent announcement of its FusionServer Pro series servers, the new intelligent servers, in Beijing on April 3.

Today in China, we were honored to host 1,280 developers, customers and partners at XDF Beijing – the second Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) for 2018. At the event, our CEO, Victor Peng, gave a keynote where we officially launched Versal and Alveo in China, but in addition, executives from three of China’s most influential companies – Huawei, Alibaba and Inspur, took to the stage to disclose how they are leveraging Xilinx technology to improve and accelerate key data center workloads, like AI inference. 

With the continuing advance of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things and other drivers of computing demand, enterprises managing huge exabyte-scale data centers need to move more and more data faster and faster. One secret to handling that traffic growth is to bring new data acceleration capabilities closer to the data itself.

That’s the concept advanced by Manish Muthal, the Vice President of Data Center Marketing here at Xilinx, in a keynote address he delivered Aug. 8 at the 2018 Flash Memory Summit held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley.