7/10/2023 0 Comments Garden story sap![]() Intel OFS enables software, hardware, and application developers to use standard interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs) to accelerate workload development and enable code reuse. The Intel Programmable Solutions Group also offers a wide range of high-performance PCIe-based FPGA acceleration cards, such as the Intel® Stratix® 10 FPGA-based Intel FPGA PAC D5005.Ĭomplementing these FPGA acceleration cards is the Intel OFS, a scalable, source-accessible hardware and software infrastructure that addresses the challenges associated with designing FPGA-based acceleration platform solutions deployed in Intel® Xeon®-processor-based servers. The Intel Programmable Solutions Group offers a wide variety of industry-leading FPGAs and SoC FPGAs. The challenge was to prototype the Re-Pair compression workload deployment using Docker containers in SAP’s HANA Cloud employing its Garden Linux operating system (OS) in conjunction with a high-performance PCI Express (PCIe)-based FPGA acceleration card. ![]() Docker is a common type of container used by many CSPs. Using containers facilitates moving applications from one server to another because everything that is required to run that application is already inside the container. In the context of computing, a container is a fully functional and portable cloud or non-cloud computing environment that includes the application along with any libraries and other dependencies. SAP has its own Garden Linux distribution. Garden Linux is a Debian GNU/Linux derivate crafted to provide small, auditable Linux images for use by cloud service providers (CSPs) and bare metal deployments. This means that algorithms like Re-Pair can be executed quickly while consuming relatively little power. However, the programmable fabric in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be configured to perform algorithmic processing in a massively parallel fashion. Unfortunately, Re-Pair is a computationally intensive and expensive algorithm that has not enjoyed widespread use in the data management community due to its prohibitively high compression and decompression times when implemented on central processing units (CPUs). Re-Pair is a compression algorithm that is well suited for applications such as string dictionaries that require random accesses to compressed data. Alternatively, using these algorithms to compress each dictionary entry individually would present its own inefficiencies because they are not optimized to compress small amounts of data. If a dictionary were compressed in this way, the entire file would have to be decompressed to access a single entry, which would be extremely inefficient in terms of time, computation, and power consumed. There are many different compression algorithms available (LZ77, LZR, LZSS, LZMA, ZStandard, etc.), but these algorithms are typically employed to compress large quantities of information into a single block. String dictionaries in particular may contain vast amounts of textual data that needs to be compressed to minimize memory requirements. It is an enterprise-grade database server that can store and retrieve data as requested by higher-level applications leveraging its in-memory and columnar storage for hybrid transaction/analytical processing.Ĭolumnar data in SAP HANA is encoded with dictionaries, mapping any domain value to a fixed size value. SAP HANA is a relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. ![]() SAP SE is a German multinational software corporation based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg that develops enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. This was facilitated by the fact that Intel OFS Device Feature List (DFL) FPGA drivers have been included in all versions of the Garden Linux kernel from release 5.15 onwards.īy using Intel OFS, SAP is able to leverage workload portability across Intel FPGA-based devices, a growing ecosystem of Intel OFS-enabled partner boards and workloads, flexibility in bare-metal/virtualized/containerized deployments, and upstreamed and open-sourced kernel drivers and user space code. Furthermore, they were able to leverage Docker containers by following the Intel OFS deployment flow. SAP developers used Intel OFS to expedite deployment of their string compression workload onto an Intel FPGA PAC D5005. The Intel Open FPGA Stack (Intel OFS) eases the development and deployment of custom boards and workloads using Intel or third-party platforms powered by Intel® FPGAs. They needed to use FPGAs to accelerate the computationally intensive Re-Pair compression algorithm and hoped to employ Docker containers in SAP’s HANA cloud employing SAP’s own Garden Linux operating system (OS). Developers at SAP wished to create a proof-of-concept (PoC) of cloud-based Compression as a Service (CaaS).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |