Vitis™ Unified Software Platform Overview
The Vitis unified software platform includes:
- Comprehensive core development kit to seamlessly build accelerated applications
- Rich set of hardware-accelerated open-source libraries optimized for Xilinx hardware platforms
- Plug-in domain-specific development environments enabling development directly in familiar, higher-level frameworks
- A Growing ecosystem of hardware-accelerated partner libraries and pre-built applications
Key Components of the Vitis Unified Software Platform
Vitis AI Development Environment
The Vitis AI development environment is a specialized development environment for accelerating AI inference on Xilinx embedded platforms, Alveo accelerator cards, or on the FPGA-instances in the cloud. Vitis AI development environment supports the industry’s leading deep learning frameworks like Tensorflow and Caffe, and offers comprehensive APIs to prune, quantize, optimize, and compile your trained networks to achieve the highest AI inference performance for your deployed application.
Vitis Accelerated Libraries
Open-source, performance-optimized libraries that offer out-of-the-box acceleration with minimal to zero-code changes to your existing applications, written in C, C++ or Python. Leverage the domain-specific accelerated libraries as-is, modify to suit your requirements or use as algorithmic building blocks in your custom accelerators.
Vitis Core Development Kit
Complete set of graphical and command-line developer tools that include the Vitis compilers, analyzers and debuggers to build, analyze performance bottlenecks and debug accelerated algorithms, developed in C, C++ or OpenCL. Leverage these features within your own IDEs or use the standalone Vitis IDE.
Xilinx Runtime library
Xilinx Runtime library (XRT) facilitates communication between your application code (running on an embedded ARM or x86 Host) and the accelerators deployed on the reconfigurable portion of PCIe based Xilinx accelerator cards, MPSoC based embedded platforms or ACAPs. It includes user-space libraries and APIs, kernel drivers, board utilities, and firmware.
Vitis Target Platforms
The Vitis target platform defines base hardware and software architecture and application context for Xilinx platforms, including external memory interfaces, custom input/output interfaces and software runtime.
- For Xilinx accelerator cards on-premise or in the cloud, the Vitis target platform automatically configures the PCIe interfaces that connect and manage communication between your FPGA accelerators and x86 Application code – you don’t need to implement any connection details!
- For Xilinx embedded devices, the Vitis target platform also includes the operating system for the processor on the platform, boot loader and drivers for platform peripherals, and root file system. You can use predefined Vitis target platforms for Xilinx evaluation boards or define your own in Vivado® Design Suite.
Using Vitis Software for Application Acceleration Development Flows
Design accelerators for your data and compute-intensive applications at the edge, on-premise or in the cloud:
- Identify the performance-critical portions of your application that demands acceleration.
- Design Accelerators using Vitis Accelerated libraries or develop your own in C,C++, OpenCL or RTL.
- Build, Analyze and Debug to verify functional correctness and validate performance goals are met.
- Deploy Accelerated Application on Xilinx Platforms at edge, on-premise or cloud.
Using Vitis Software for Embedded Software Development Flows
Vitis core development kit includes comprehensive developer tools to design, debug, and deploy software applications targeted towards embedded processors on Xilinx Zynq, MPSoC, RFSoC, and ACAP devices. Vitis embedded software development features include:
- Importing target platform definition created using Vivado® Design Suite
- Application development for single, multi-processor and heterogenous processor systems
- Ability to create and configure board support packages (BSPs) for third-party OS
- Board bring-up and Firmware development
- System-level performance analysis and benchmarking
- Real-time debug and trace of heterogeneous embedded systems
Learn More about the Xilinx Embedded Software Infrastructure.
Edge Deployment
As the data being produced continues to explode, there's a growing need to be able to bring computing power closer to the source of the data to meet the response-time, power-consumption and cost goals of performance-critical applications like IIoT, Automated Driving, Medical Imaging, Surveillance among others.
Xilinx embedded platforms are enabling applications where differentiation is key, power efficiency is critical, systems must be extremely responsive, and the latest algorithms and sensors need to be quickly deployed.
On-Premise Deployment
Xilinx® Alveo™ Data Center accelerator cards are designed to meet the constantly changing needs of the modern Data Center, providing up to 90X performance increase over CPUs for common workloads, including machine learning inference, quantitative finance, video transcoding, and database search and analytics.
Vitis software development platform enables application, software, and hardware developers alike to leverage the power of Alveo accelerator cards to meet the demanding compute, network, and storage requirements of their applications.
Cloud Deployment
Xilinx Platforms are designed to meet the constantly changing needs of modern data center workloads like Deep Learning, Video Transcoding, Big Data Analytics, Genomics, Compression, Network Security & Search that require high bandwidth, enhanced networking, and very high compute capabilities over CPU and GPU alternatives, while lowering the total cost of ownership.
Xilinx FPGAs are now broadly accessible to all developers everywhere through public cloud service providers like Amazon AWS and Nimbix. Using Vitis, you can leverage the power of Xilinx FPGAs in the cloud, while continuing to develop in familiar programming languages like C and C++. You can also publish your FPGA-accelerated applications on the broader cloud marketplace and monetize your solutions.
Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation
The Vitis™ unified software platform documentation provides support for using Vitis for each of the two software development flows: Application acceleration development and Embedded software development.
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Develop Accelerated Applications
6 steps to setup and accelerate your application using Vitis Unified Software Platform:
Develop Using Vitis in the Cloud
Develop accelerated applications with the Vitis Unified Software Platform in the Cloud – No local software installations or upfront purchase of hardware platforms necessary (pay-as-you-go). Log in and get started right away.
Access Vitis Tools using the FPGA Developer AMI, on AWS Marketplace. This AMI (Amazon Machine Instance) includes everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your accelerated algorithms on F1 instances – no local software setups required.
Evaluate the Vitis Unified Software Platform with Alveo accelerator cards on Nimbix. Quickly evaluate the performance benefits Xilinx platforms can bring to your applications, with no upfront purchase of cards or local software setup required.
Vitis Target Platforms
Note: Alveo Target Platforms for 2019.2 are compatible with Vitis tools 2020.1
For instructions on how to create custom embedded target platforms for Vitis, see Vitis Embedded Software Development User Guide – UG1416
Video Tutorials
Webinars
Bring Applications to Life with Vitis
In this webinar, learn about the Vitis environment and how it enables the development of embedded software and accelerated applications on Xilinx platforms.
Adaptable AI Inference with Vitis AI
In this webinar, go in depth with the key components of Vitis AI and learn how to achieve adaptable and efficient AI inference on Xilinx hardware platforms.
Develop with Vitis Accelerated Libraries
In this Webinar, learn about the different levels of abstraction offered, see a demo walk-through of getting started using the Vitis libraries and get a glimpse of the performance benefits you can achieve.
Vitis AI Deep Dive
In this Webinar, learn to use Vitis AI to deploy and run your pre-trained DNN models to Xilinx’s embedded SoC and Alveo acceleration platforms. Then get started with using Vitis AI to run examples on the board.
Design Methodology
In this webinar, we will introduce developers to the methodology for architecting accelerated applications and discuss the best practices for developing high-performance kernels using C/C++.
Whole App Acceleration
In this webinar, we will show how Vitis and Vitis AI enable developers to accelerate the whole application on Xilinx platforms.