from Hacker News

Inside the Microsoft FPGA-based configurable cloud [video]

by willyyr on 5/17/17, 7:49 AM with 18 comments

• by samuell on 5/17/17, 3:59 PM

  The explanation of FPGAs between 5:00 and ~12:00 was very very good.

  TL;DW:

  - FPGAs are more power-efficient than CPUs and GPUs

  - FPGAs are more flexible than ASICs

  FPGAs vs CPUs:

  - CPU: Sequentially apply instructions on data in place

  - FPGA: In parallel, flow data through instructions in place

• by samuell on 5/17/17, 3:29 PM

  Tried to scan the video to see if they have any support for reconfigure.io [1] (Code FPGAs with Go concurrency primitives). Didn't see any mention. Anybody knows more? Or I'll have to watch the vid in detail ... looks pretty pedagogic anyways :) ...

  [1] https://reconfigure.io/

• by nintendo1889 on 5/17/17, 4:10 PM

  Google's TPU uses 28-40 W, Microsoft's uses 25 watts.

  Relevant but not deep: https://redmondmag.com/blogs/the-schwartz-report/2016/10/dif...

• by mmalone on 5/17/17, 3:56 PM

  Why aren't more people deploying FPGAs like this? I started looking into using FPGAs for distributed systems work about six years ago when I was building a distributed database. Since then, about once a month I come across some problem that an FPGA could be useful for (i.e., enhance the performance enough that something otherwise infeasible becomes feasible). The devices themselves aren't that expensive (<$100) so why doesn't every server have one? Is there some hidden cost I'm not aware of (socket real estate, power consumption)? Or is it just a chicken-and-egg problem with not enough engineers asking for them because they don't know how they work because they're not more widely deployed?

• by drewg123 on 5/17/17, 5:52 PM

  Does anybody know if the FPGA accelerated NIC uses a different driver on the guest VM, or just the standard hyperv net driver?

  If it uses the standard hyperv driver, can a guest be migrated live between accelerated and unaccelerated hosts?