The Configurable Cloud - Accelerating Hyperscale Datacenter Services with FPGA
Andrew R. Putnam · 2017
Summary form only given. The Catapult project has brought the power and performance of FPGA-based reconfigurable computing to Microsoft's hyperscale datacenters, accelerating major production cloud applications such as Bing Web search and Microsoft Azure, and enabling a new generation of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. Catapult is now deployed in nearly every new server across the more than a million machines that make up the Microsoft hyperscale cloud. In this talk, I will describe the next generation of the Catapult configurable cloud architecture, show some of the applications have been accelerated by Catapult, and discuss the experiences and lessons learned while bringing up the first applications in the configurable cloud. In particular, I will highlight the impact that this new Configurable Cloud architecture has on data-centric applications, where specialized hardware blurs the boundaries between compute and storage, and between local and remote servers. The configurable cloud will form a new infrastructure on which the next generation of data mining, databases, and Big Data applications can be built.