The configurable cloud - accelerating hyperscale datacenter services with FPGAs
Andrew R. Putnam · 2016
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. 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. I will also share stories of the evolution of Catapult - from its origins as a single development kit board through to the hyperscale deployment of hundreds of thousands of FPGAs across 15 countries and 5 continents - highlighting insights and experiences that transformed Catapult from a caffeine-fueled PowerPoint presentation into the largest deployment of reconfigurable computing in the world.