Paper Reading 10-14: A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/a-reconfigurable-fabric-for-accelerating-large-scale-datacenter-services/

This is one of the series of papers from Microsoft’s Project Catapult, which studies leveraging reconfigurable devices (FPGA, etc.) to accelerate data center, from very specific accelerating algorithms like page ranking for Bing search engine, to more sophisticated machine learning frameworks like DNN.

This is one of their early publications, which introduces the basic design and implementation of the FPGA accelerated datacenter. It covers the very fundamental details of all aspects of server design, from hardware, network topology, FPGA core design, fault-tolerant cluster management software design, workload scheduling algorithm, and etc…

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