Xilinx, Inc. today announced Vitis (pronounced Vī-tis), a unified software platform that enables a broad new range of developers – including software engineers and AI scientists – to take advantage of the power of hardware adaptability.

One of the issues with modern heterogeneous compute architectures is that they’re difficult for the average software developer to work with. You have to have a lot of hardware expertise to understand how to be utilize the various compute resources in modern systems, from CPUs to GPUs and FGPAs.

The Vitis unified software platform automatically tailors the Xilinx hardware architecture to the software or algorithmic code without the need for hardware expertise. Rather than imposing a proprietary development environment, the Vitis platform plugs into common software developer tools and utilizes a set of optimized open source libraries, enabling developers to focus on their algorithms.

"With exponentially increasing compute needs, engineers and scientists are often limited by the fixed nature of silicon," said Victor Peng, president and chief executive officer, Xilinx. "Xilinx has created a singular environment that enables programmers and engineers from all disciplines to co-develop and optimize both their hardware and software, using the tools and frameworks they already know and understand. This means that they can adapt their hardware architecture to their application without the need for new silicon."

The Vitis platform is built on a stack-based architecture that plugs into open-source standard development systems and build environments, but most importantly, it includes a rich set of standard libraries.

The base layer is the Vitis target platform, which includes a board and preprogrammed I/O. The second layer, called the Vitis core development kit, encompasses the open-source Xilinx runtime library to manage the data movement between different domains, including the subsystems, the AI Engine in the forthcoming Versal ACAP, as well as an external host, if required. This layer also includes the core development tools such as compilers, analyzers and debuggers. While Xilinx provides a design environment, these tools are designed to integrate with industry-standard build systems and development environments.

In the third layer are more than 400 optimized and open-source applications across eight Vitis libraries.

These include the Vitis Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) library, the Vitis Solver library, the Vitis Security library, the Vitis Vision library, the Vitis Data Compression library, the Vitis Quantitative Finance library, the Vitis Database library and the Vitis AI library. These enable software developers to call pre-accelerated functions using a standard application programming interface (API).

The fourth element of the platform is Vitis AI, which integrates a domain specific architecture (DSA). The DSA configures Xilinx hardware to be optimized and programmed using frameworks like TensorFlow and Caffe. Vitis AI provides the tools to optimize, compress and compile trained AI models running on a Xilinx device in about one minute. It also delivers specialized APIs for deployment from edge to cloud. Xilinx will soon be releasing another DSA, called Vitis Video, to enable video encoding directly from FFmpeg for the same, simple end-to-end solution. DSAs available from Xilinx's partner companies include Illumina, which integrates with GATK for genome analysis, and BlackLynx, which integrates with ElasticSearch for big data analytics, along with proprietary DSAs that are currently being utilized.

Xilinx also today announced it has launched a developer site that provides access to examples, tutorials and documentation, as well as a space to connect the Vitis developer community.

The Vitis unified software platform is free for Xilinx boards and will be available for download next month.