FPGA-based data center cases: the deployment on huge workloads computing needs

TAIPEI, TAIWAN,Aug. 31, 2020 – As the development of Moore’s Law slows down, the demand for an immense number of emerging data processing has increased. Whether it be in large-scale enterprise data centers, or small companies, the consideration of emerging working for higher flexibility and energy saving hardware infrastructure for emerging workloads has seen a burgeoning demand. FPGAs fit precisely under this high demand market and have been adopted by many cloud giants as a new choice for data center deployment when building data centers. We have compiled a few cases of using FPGA as a core or experimental computing platform to let everyone know more about the subordinates and applications of FPGA.

Microsoft Project Catapult

From a decade ago, Microsoft began to utilize FPGAs' high performance and high flexibility advantages to expand their CPUs and transform it into cloud-computing. In 2013, Microsoft enabled FPGAs in 1632 servers; this efficiently demonstrated with proof that the latency retrieval on Bing’s webpage has been improved by a staggering 40 times of the speed when compared to a CPU. It proves that even when the number of servers are reduced, research speed can still be increased.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS uses a large quantity of FPGAs on its own network switches and serves to develop their own computing core. AWS also provides Amazon EC2 F1 instances, which use FPGAs to enable delivery of custom hardware accelerators, allowing ordinary developers to use the AWS platform to provide computing acceleration services (Accelerator-as-a-Service).

Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud also provides a development platform affiliated with FPGA. Developers can use the development environment provided by Alibaba Cloud to import existing solutions onto the cloud. Alibaba Cloud also provides two mainstream development platforms, Intel and Xilinx; this further allows developers to choose according to the existing development environment.

FPGAs have been making an appearance on commercial cloud platforms as computing services for specific and specialized applications. Through the heterogeneous computing architecture of CPU combined with FPGA, the work efficiency of the server cluster is improved and the workload is increased.

References:

[1] Instances F1 Amazon EC2

[2] Compute optimized instance families with FPGAs

[3] From FPGA to Support Cloud to Cloud of FPGA: State of the Art

[4] Project Catapult

[5] Time in the sun coming for cloud FPGAs

#FPGAComputing #DataCenter #CloudComputing