Let’s talk about Field Programmable Gate Array or FPGA as it is widely known. At first, the acceleration of resource-intensive tasks that are taking place on the network edge, is becoming a very important challenge to solve, especially in the emerging market of 5G. Many industries are currently addressing this data deluge by throwing more resources at the problem. These sources are almost always in the form of standard x86 processors. However, so far, there has been no solid solution that addresses both the integration and the development overhead aspects, providing an appropriate solution for robust acceleration at the edge. What TERMINET is trying to do differently is to leverage FPGA approach. Basically, TERMINET try to solve the above problem with ease.
Health sector is one of the domains that can gain a significant advantage by utilizing such a technology that TERMINET can provide. Complex Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and applications that are utilizing them, can be accelerated up to 10 times while at the same moment minimize the power consumption needed for this intense work. Furthermore, such an approach can reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by easily integrating programmable logic devices (aka FPGAs) into their edge infrastructure.
FPGAs offer a sweet spot between performance, flexibility, and power consumption. Enabling this will make the FPGA accessible as a resource over the network, being able to deploy compute tasks on the device remotely depending on the application at hand. In particular, the FPGA module will become the core cross-layer component of edge nodes, undertaking all the tasks that need high computing resources and are related to sensor data analysis, object recognition and image processing.
To sum up, by utilising the aforementioned concepts and methods, TERMINET will introduce new business opportunities and will add new monetization strategies to the industry partners who will adapt Virtualised Multiaccess Edge Computing (vMEC) based resources, resulting to the introduction of novel services and applications. As the TERMINET project is reaching the stage where the final architecture is taking shape, main target is to deploy edge nodes by using accelerated FPGAs modules. Hence, the expertise and the related effort for fulfilling this task is covered in the project by the technology SME, Future Intelligence Ltd (FINT).