Xilinx Announces First Adaptive Computing Challenge 

A new contest is challenging the computing world. Xilinx has announced the first Xilinx Adaptive Computing Challenge, a competition that will task developers and startups with finding creative workload acceleration solutions.

Xilinx is running the Adaptive Computing Challenge in partnership with Hackster.io, a developer community oriented around learning, programming and building hardware. The developer segment of the competition consists of three platforms and application categories, all aiming for workload acceleration using Xilinx’s Vitis Unified Software Platform and Vitis AI tools.

Intelligent Video Analytics (Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZCU104 Evaluation Kit): Develop solutions including, but not limited to: smart city, smart retail, ADAS, robotics vision, medical imaging, and other video analytics applications.  

Adaptable Compute Acceleration (Alveo U50 Accelerator Card): Implement hardware acceleration for challenging, compute-intensive workloads, including, but not limited to: FinTech, machine learning, computational storage, and data search and analytics. 

Adaptive Intelligence of Things (Avnet Ultra96-V2 Development Board): Build any application that shows how you’d leverage the power of adaptive computing in the age of IoT 2.0. We are looking for the best use of hardware acceleration with programmable logic.

Participants in the startup track of the challenge, meanwhile, will "focus on solving real-world problems with technology innovations on any hardware, including custom platforms that run on Xilinx silicon." This track asks competitors to show significant performance boosts or total cost of ownership improvements using the Vitis development environment for system-level integration and acceleration.

The organizers are offering prizes to the top nine projects in the developer track (first, second and third place in each of the three categories) with a top prize of $54,000. The startup track will have three winners (first, second and third place) with a total prize pool of over $150,000.

There are several important dates to keep track of if you’re looking to participate in the Adaptive Computing Challenge. First is developer registration, which began on July 7 and is currently ongoing. Developer registration will remain open until the closing submission deadline, which will be on November 15 of this year; however, applications for free or loaned hardware from Xilinx will only remain open until August 14. Once developer submissions are closed, there will be a one-month wait until the nine winners are announced on December 15.

The initial timeline for the startup track is stricter, with registration closing on August 14. However, submissions are allowed until a later date (January 1, 2021) and the three winners will be announced on February 15, 2021.

To learn more about the competition, including how to register, click here.