A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services

Author

Putnam, Andrew ; Caulfield, Adrian M. ; Chung, Eric S. ; Chiou, Derek ; Constantinides, Kypros ; Demme, John ; Esmaeilzadeh, Hadi ; Fowers, Jeremy ; Gopal, Gopi Prashanth ; Gray, Jan ; Haselman, Michael ; Hauck, Scott ; Heil, Stephen ; Hormati, Amir ; Joo

Volume

35

Issue

3

fYear

2015

fDate

May-June 2015

Firstpage

10

Lastpage

22

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.

Keywords

computer centres; field programmable gate arrays; reconfigurable architectures; search engines; Bing Web search engine; FPGA; commodity server design; composable reconfigurable fabric; datacenter capability; high-end field-programmable gate arrays; large-scale datacenter service acceleration; large-scale software service acceleration; production datacenter; Data centers; Field programmable gate arrays; Reconfigurable architectures; Search engines; Servers; Software engineering; Web services; FPGA; datacenter; reconfigurable computing; web search;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Micro, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0272-1732

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/MM.2015.42

Filename

7106407