The pilot program under the Alibaba Cloud-Intel partnership can expect to produce further innovations beyond what is currently planned. (Photo : Getty Images)
Alibaba Cloud has partnered with Intel to produce a pilot program aimed at building a field programmable gate array (FPGA) acceleration service that utilizes cloud computing. Said program aims to provide consumers using cloud services to virtually access productivity-related compute resources.
An FPGA is an integrated circuit configurable by a "field-programming" user. With cloud computing being central to the Alibaba Cloud-Intel partnership, the pilot program enables management of scientific and enterprise workloads without the need for on-premises FPGA infrastructure, eWeek reported.
The pilot program consists of the following components: Xeon processor-equipped servers, Intel Arria 10 FPGAs, and a preconfigured infrastructure made of software development tools meant for application acceleration. That allows Alibaba Cloud to provide workload acceleration through cloud computing.
With the aim to reduce risks related to upfront investment in on-premises FPGA infrastructure, the pilot program plans to enable consumers to receive workload acceleration with scalability available at their immediate demand, said Alibaba Cloud Senior Director Jin Li.
"We offer customers access to [cloud] services . . . and adding an FPGA-based acceleration offering means they can access that powerful computing without the cost or requirement of building out their own infrastructure," Jin remarked of Alibaba Cloud's cost-saving workload acceleration measure.
Alibaba Cloud further emphasized the importance of FPGAs in workload acceleration, given that users can program on it to customize acceleration and scaling of workloads per kind, including media transcode, machine learning, and data encryption, among others.
With parent company Alibaba Group set to expand investment in cloud computing per Yibada, the pilot program under the Alibaba Cloud-Intel partnership can expect to produce further innovations beyond what is currently planned.
Intel's involvement in the pilot program is an empowering measure for Alibaba Cloud, which seeks to provide productivity options designed with the greatest convenience of end-users in mind, as enabled by various cloud computing usages.
