A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services

2015207 citationsJournal Articlegreen Open Access

Authors

Andrew Putnam · Microsoft (United States)

Adrian M. Caulfield · Microsoft (United States)

Eric S. Chung · Microsoft Research (United Kingdom)

Derek Chiou · The University of Texas at Austin

Kypros Constantinides · Amazon (United States)

John Demme · Columbia University

Hadi Esmaeilzadeh

Abstract

To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, the authors designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric to accelerate large-scale software services. Each instantiation of the fabric consists of a 6 x 8 2D torus of high-end field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) embedded into a half-rack of 48 servers. The authors deployed the reconfigurable fabric in a bed of 1,632 servers and FPGAs in a production datacenter and successfully used it to accelerate the ranking portion of the Bing Web search engine by nearly a factor of two.

Topics & Keywords

Cloud Computing and Resource Management Software System Performance and Reliability Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques

UN Sustainable Development Goals

Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Publication Details

Published in: IEEE Micro

Volume 35, Issue 3, pp. 10-22

DOI: 10.1109/mm.2015.42

Field-Weighted Citation Impact: 52.44