Agile Co-Design for a Reconfigurable Datacenter
Shlomi Alkalay, Hari Angepat, Adrian M. Caulfield, Eric S. Chung, Oren Firestein, Michael Haselman, Stephen Heil, Kyle Holohan, Matt Humphrey, Tamas Juhasz, Puneet Kaur, Sitaram Lanka, Daniel Lo, Todd Massengill, Kalin Ovtcharov, Michael K. Papamichael, Andrew R. Putnam, Raja Seera, Rimon Tadros, Jason Thong · 2016
In 2015, a team of software and hardware developers at Microsoft shipped the world?s first commercial search engine accelerated using FPGAs in the datacenter. During the sprint to production, new algorithms in the Bing ranking service were ported into FPGAs and deployed to a production bed within several weeks of conception, leading to significant gains in latency and throughput. The fast turnaround time of new features demanded by an agile software culture would not have been possible without a disciplined and effective approach to co-design in the datacenter. This talk will describe some of the learnings and best practices developed from this unique experience.