Vitis™ Hardware Acceleration Tutorials

See Vitis™ Development Environment on xilinx.com

Section 2 - System Setup¶

In order to proceed to the Vitis optimization part of the tutorial, we’ll need to setup the environment and the tools. Please follow the below steps to install and setup Vitis and Alveo U50 accelerator card.

Install Vitis Software Platform¶

The Vitis Unified Software Development Platform provides a unified programming model for accelerating Edge, Cloud, and Hybrid computing applications. To develop applications, you will need to download and install the Vitis core development kit from Xilinx Download Center, Vitis 2020.1 will be used for this tutorial.

Note: The Vitis core development kit does not need to be installed on the same server as the Alveo Data Center accelerator card. It can be installed on a system without any cards installed if you only need for development flow, but XRT and target development platform for Alveo card must be installed to work with Vitis.

Alternative Solution

Alternatively, you can also develop and deploy applications on cloud server such as Nimbix , it comes with everything you need to develop your hardware acceleration code and deploy applications to be run on the host server and installed accelerator cards.

Please choose from Alveo ▸ U50 ▸ Xilinx Vitis Unified Software Platform 2020.1 to start a compute desktop at Nimbix. And before launch a Desktop with FPGA, make sure you choose Xilinx U50 at the pull down window of machine type.

For this tutorial, you need to set below environment variable to your Terminal of Nimbix Desktop before start to launch Vitis or run Makefile command we provided with source code.

 export PATH=/opt/xilinx/Vivado/2022.1/tps/lnx64/gcc-6.2.0/bin:$PATH

Install Alveo U50 Accelerator card¶

For details of Alveo U50 accelerator card we are about to use for this tutorial, visit the Alveo U50 Product Page. It provides links to all the resources necessary to become familiar with the Alveo U50 Data Center accelerator card along with installation packages and instructions on both RedHat/CentOS and Ubuntu operating systems under Getting Started tab.

To install Alveo U50 accelerator card on your server, follow the instructions in the Alveo U50 Data Center Accelerator Card Installation Guide (UG1370). It provides the latest hardware and driver software installation procedures including card bring-up and validation, also the steps to deploy hardware accelerated applications using the Alveo U50 card.

Alternative Solution

Alternatively, you can also develop and deploy applications on cloud server such as Nimbix , it comes with everything you need to develop your hardware acceleration code and deploy applications to be run on the host server and installed accelerator cards.

Please choose from Alveo ▸ U50 ▸ Xilinx Vitis Unified Software Platform 2020.1 to start a compute desktop at Nimbix. And before launch a Desktop with FPGA, make sure you choose Xilinx U50 at the pull down window of machine type.

For this tutorial, you need to set below environment variable to your Terminal of Nimbix Desktop before start to launch Vitis or run Makefile command we provided with source code.

export PATH=/opt/xilinx/Vivado/2022.1/tps/lnx64/gcc-6.2.0/bin:$PATH

Setup Environment to Run Vitis¶

To configure the environment to run the Vitis software platform, run the following scripts, which set up the environment to run in a specific command shell.

#setup XILINX_VITIS and XILINX_VIVADO variables
source <Vitis_install_path>/Vitis/2022.1/settings64.sh
#setup XILINX_XRT
source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh

To specify the location of the target development platform for Alveo U50 accelerator card, set the following environment variable:

export PLATFORM_REPO_PATHS=<path to platforms>

Validate Alveo U50 Accelerator card¶

With the Alveo U50 accelerator card installed in a server, you can deploy applications to be run on the host server and accelerator card. Follow the instructions in Chaptor 5 - Card Bring-Up and Validation of the Alveo U50 Data Center Accelerator Card Installation Guide (UG1370) to validate your installed Alveo U50 card.

The xbutil validate command validates the correct installation by performing a various set of tests on the giving Alveo card, and you need to setup environment for XRT to perform the validation.

#setup XILINX_XRT
source /opt/xilinx/xrt/setup.sh
#validate Alveo card
xbutil validate

If your Alveo U50 has been correctly installed, you will see a high-level summary of the tests performed similar to the following output after performing xbutil validate.

INFO: Found 1 cards
INFO: Validating card[0]: xilinx_u50_gen3x16_xdma_201920_3
INFO: == Starting AUX power connector check:
AUX power connector not available. Skipping validation
INFO: == AUX power connector check SKIPPED
INFO: == Starting PCIE link check:
INFO: == PCIE link check PASSED
INFO: == Starting SC firmware version check:
INFO: == SC firmware version check PASSED
INFO: == Starting verify kernel test:
INFO: == verify kernel test PASSED
INFO: == Starting DMA test:
Host -> PCIe -> FPGA write bandwidth = 11933.1 MB/s
Host <- PCIe <- FPGA read bandwidth = 11966.5 MB/s
INFO: == DMA test PASSED
INFO: == Starting device memory bandwidth test:
...........
Maximum throughput: 52428 MB/s
INFO: == device memory bandwidth test PASSED
INFO: == Starting PCIE peer-to-peer test:
P2P BAR is not enabled. Skipping validation
INFO: == PCIE peer-to-peer test SKIPPED
INFO: == Starting memory-to-memory DMA test:
M2M is not available. Skipping validation
INFO: == memory-to-memory DMA test SKIPPED
INFO: Card[0] validated successfully.
INFO: All cards validated successfully.

Please proceed to Section 3.