With Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.22 and later, the transcoder in Wowza Streaming Engine™ media server software supports accelerated video transcoding with an AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 data center accelerator card in a preview mode. For more information, see Limitations of AMD Xilinx acceleration with Wowza Streaming Engine transcoding.
This article describes the requirements for transcoding with an AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 data center accelerator card.
Note: With Wowza Streaming Engine 4.8.22, we added support for accelerated video transcoding with an AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 data center accelerator card only on Linux-based servers and is tested against Ubuntu Server 20.04 with the 5.4.0 kernel.
U30 introduction
- U30 is a single slot, half-height, half-length, low profile form factor card, so there should be enough space in your server to accommodate this card.
- U30 is a passively-cooled card operating up to a 25W total dissipated power (TDP).
- For more details about the U30 data sheet and installation guide, see the Xilinx Alveo U30 data center accelerator card documentation.
Linux-based server specifications
The following are the server specifications for a Linux-based server:
- These distributions are supported:
- Ubuntu 22.04 (Kernel 5.15)
Note: This distribution requires a manual adjustment to the startup.sh script. Add option -f to line 17, replacing . /opt/xilinx/xcdr/setup.sh with . /opt/xilinx/xcdr/setup.sh -f.
- Ubuntu 20.04.3 (Kernel 5.11)
- Ubuntu 20.04.1 (Kernel 5.4)
- Ubuntu 20.04.0 (Kernel 5.4)
- Ubuntu 18.04.5 (Kernel 5.4)
- Support of PCIe Gen 3 or Gen 4 with x4x4 bifurcation.
- 8GB RAM per card + 32GB to 64GB RAM for OS.
- CPU is >= 2 Milan cores per card.
Each AMD Xilinx Alveo U30 card has two devices. To use both devices, the motherboard should support x4x4 PCIe bifurcation or x4x4x4x4 quadrification. Otherwise, the system can use only one device. This setting has to be enabled in the system BIOS. For instructions on how to confirm if both devices are visible in the operating system, see Configure an AMD Xilinx accelerated transcoding for Wowza Streaming Engine.
