Xilinx Alveo U50, Installation Manual

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Chapter 1
Introduction
This document provides hardware and software installation procedures for the half-height, half-
length Xilinx
®
Alveo ™ U50 data center accelerator card and applies to 2020.1.1 tools versions
and later. For installation procedures using earlier tool versions, see v1.6 of Alveo U50 Data
Center Accelerator Card Installation Guide (
UG1370 ).
The Alveo U50 data center accelerator cards are PCIe
®
Gen3 x16 compliant and Gen4 x8
compatible cards featuring the Xilinx 16 nm Ult ™ technology. The Alveo U50 card
recommends 8 GB HBM to provide high-performance, adaptable acceleration for memory-
bound, compute-intensive applications including database, analytics, and machine learning
inference.
Different system configurations are available for running, developing, and debugging applications
on your Alveo accelerator cards:
• Running Applications: To configure a system to run accelerated applications, install an Alveo
card into a system as described in Chapter 3: Card Installation Procedures along with the
required deployment software to support running applications as described in Chapter 4:
Installing the Deployment Software .
• Developing Applications: To develop FPGA accelerated applications, it is necessary to install
both the deployment software and the development software. Development software
installation, described in
Chapter 6: Next Steps , consists of installing both a development
target platform and the Vitis ™ environment. This configuration does not have an Alveo card
installed and is used for development along with debugging in emulation modes.
• Running, Developing, and Debugging Applications: By installing the Alveo card along with
both the deployment and development software on a single machine, you can configure a
system for developing and running accelerated applications. With the card installed,
developers can debug applications in both emulation modes and on the hardware.
Card Features
The Alveo U50 accelerator card features are as follows.
• Ult ™ XCU50 FPGA
Chapter 1: Introduction
UG1370 (v1.7) December 9, 2020 www.xilinx.com
Alveo U50 Data Center Accelerator Card Installation Guide 6
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