SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 2, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- (Xilinx Developer Forum) - Falcon Computing, Inc. a leading player in heterogenous accelerated computing, today announced the availability of Falcon's Merlin Compiler & Falcon's Accelerated Genomics Pipeline on the new powerful Xilinx accelerator card, the Alveo U200, at the Xilinx Developer Forum (XDF) 2018. XDF connects software developers and system designers to the deep expertise of Xilinx engineers, partners, and industry leaders.
The Merlin Compiler enables software developers with no FPGA expertise to reap the benefits of Xilinx FPGAs, resulting in up to 47X acceleration of cognitive era applications such as machine learning, finance, genomics & data analytics. Falcon's Accelerated Genomics Pipeline provides an industry standard GATK pipeline capable of analyzing 5 Whole Genomes or 50 Whole Exomes per day.
Both of Falcon's products are already available on Xilinx FPGAs on public clouds including AWS, Huawei Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud. With today's announcement, software developers and bioinformaticians can enjoy the same benefits on their on-prem datacenters using servers equipped with the Alveo U200 Data Center accelerator card.
"With the launch of the Alveo U200 accelerator card, Xilinx is bringing the foundational block of public cloud-like FPGA acceleration to on-premise datacenters. Software developers developing cognitive era applications want to leverage the FPGA but struggle due to lack of hardware expertise. The Merlin Compiler enables a push-button automated approach for developers to use their C/C++ applications and improve application performance with zero FPGA expertise," said Sunder Parameswaran, VP of products & marketing, Falcon Computing.
"The benefits of acceleration extend to our own Accelerated Genomics Pipeline. As a long-time partner of Xilinx, we had early access to make our solution available on the new U200 card & deliver 10X speed-up of the original GATK pipeline," Parameswaran continued.
"Our customers in the life sciences segment are looking at FPGAs as an ideal customizable accelerator solution to address their performance needs, but they need end-to-end applications that bioinformaticians and data scientists can leverage to achieve quick and cost-effective results," said Viraj Paropkari, senior manager, data center marketing, Xilinx "Falcon's Accelerated Genomics Pipelines uniquely leverages the Alveo U200 Data Center accelerator card's capabilities to deliver a ten-fold performance improvement on the original GATK without compromising accuracy."
Falcon Computing's Participation at XDF includes a breakout session titled "The Future of Computing for Bioinformatics Applications" and a demo of their hybrid-cloud accelerated genomics solution that will be showcased in the Exhibit Hall.
More information about Falcon cloud solutions available directly in the AWS Marketplace and for more information about Falcon Computing and access to U200 on-prem solution at www.falconcomputing.com.
More information about XDF is available at: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/developer-forum/silicon-valley.html. For additional updates from XDF, follow Xilinx on Twitter at @XilinxInc or via the hashtag #XDF2018.
About Falcon
Falcon Computing enables data scientists and software developers working in Genomics, Machine Learning, Finance and Computer Vision to simplify their path to heterogeneous accelerated computing. With a simple push-button C/C++ to a highly-optimized FPGA implementation for both public and private clouds, users can achieve performance, energy-efficiency and productivity gains. Falcon Computing was founded in 2014 by Dr. Jason Cong, serial entrepreneur and Director of the Center for Domain Specific Computing (CDSC) at UCLA.
SOURCE Falcon Computing Solutions, Inc.
