SBIR Phase I: Customized Computing for Big Data Applications

小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是，它将导致全球数据中心的能源使用量大幅减少，数据中心的使用量正在以令人震惊的速度增长。一些大型互联网服务提供商在其数据中心雇用了数百万台计算服务器，每年的总能耗约为数十亿千瓦时。对于许多构成数据中心工作负载的重要部分的大数据应用，使用现场可编程门阵列(FPGA)作为可定制的计算设备可以提供显著更好的性能和能效。使用该项目开发的软件工具和IP解决方案，可以用一台服务器增强一个或多个FPGA加速卡来取代多台计算服务器，从而显著降低成本和能源。通过本项目开发的解决方案在数据中心广泛部署定制计算技术，将大大节省能源，显著减少碳排放，更重要的是，计算基础设施将更可持续地增长，以便它们能够在未来更好地扩展，以满足未来社会拥抱进一步的数字革命而快速增长的计算需求。该小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第一阶段项目专注于为数据中心的大数据应用程序实现高能效的定制计算。广泛采用基于现场可编程门阵列的定制计算的最大障碍是编程的困难。该项目的创新之处包括开发了一套高度自动化的编译、运行时调度和资源管理工具，以及高性能的FPGA加速库，使之能够在数据中心规模高效、透明地利用FPGA资源，加速许多大规模的分布式计算应用。根据这一提议开发的软件和IP解决方案将使广泛的应用程序开发商能够在数据中心广泛使用现场可编程门阵列，从而显著提高应用程序开发商的编程生产率，并大幅降低数据中心运营商的精力和成本(同时提供相同的性能)。该项目的目标是在一些大数据应用程序域的数据中心中展示基于FPGA的定制计算在性能、能效、可编程性和易用性方面相对于现代多核服务器和GPU的可行性和优势。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is that it will result in a significant reduction in the energy usage of datacenters worldwide, which is increasing at an alarming rate. Some of the large Internet service providers employ several million computing servers in their datacenters with an annual total energy usage in the order of multi-billion kilowatt hours. For many big data applications that constitute a significant portion of workload in datacenters, using field programmable gate array (FPGA) as a customizable computing device can provide significantly better performance and energy efficiency. Using the software tools and IP solutions developed from this project, one may replace several computing servers with one server augmented with one or more FPGA acceleration cards, resulting in significant cost and energy reduction. The wide deployment of customized computing technology in datacenters as enabled by the solutions developed in this project will lead to substantial energy savings, significant reduction of carbon emissions, and more importantly, more sustainable growth of computing infrastructures so that they can better scale in the future to meet the rapidly increasing computing demands as our society embraces further digital revolution in the coming decades.This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project focuses on enabling energy-efficient customized computing for big data applications in datacenters. The most significant barrier for widespread adoption of FPGA-based customized computing is the difficulty in programming FPGAs. The innovation of this project includes the development of a set of highly automated compilation, runtime scheduling and resource management tools, as well as high-performance FPGA acceleration libraries to enable efficient and transparent utilization of FPGA resources at the datacenter scale for acceleration of many large-scale distributed computing applications. The software and IP solutions developed under this proposal will enable widespread use of FPGAs in datacenters by a wide range of application developers, resulting in significant improvement in programming productivity by the application developers and substantial energy and cost reduction by the datacenter operators (while delivering the same performance). The goal of this project is to demonstrate the viability and advantage of FPGA-based customized computing in datacenters for some big data application domains against modern multi-core servers and GPUs in terms of performance, energy-efficiency, programmability, and ease of use.