We are glad to announce the first public release of the Open Programmable Acceleration Engine (OPAE) today. The Open Programmable Acceleration Engine is a software framework for managing and accessing programmable accelerators (FPGAs). It currently consists of two main parts, the OPAE SDK, and the OPAE Linux driver for Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU with FPGAs, and is under active development to extend to more platforms. The OPAE SDK is a collection of libraries and tools to facilitate the development of software applications and accelerators using OPAE. It provides a library implementing the OPAE C API for presenting a streamlined and easy-to-use interface for software applications to discover, access, and manage FPGA devices and accelerators using the OPAE software stack. The OPAE SDK also includes the AFU Simulation Environment (ASE) for end-to-end simulation of accelerator RTL together with software applications using the OPAE C API. OPAE is intended to be a community effort to simplify the development and deployment of FPGA applications, so we explicitly welcome discussions and contributions! The OPAE SDK source, unless otherwise noted, is released under a BSD 3-clause license. Download the release at https://github.com/OPAE/opae-sdk/releases General documentation and further links for OPAE can be found at http://01.org/OPAE The OPAE mailing list is available at http://lists.01.org/mailman/listinfo/OPAE The OPAE SDK source code repository is hosted at http://github.com/OPAE/opae-sdk To report bugs, please use the issue tracker at http://github.com/OPAE/opae-sdk/issues - The OPAE Development Team