An FPGA Cluster for High-Performance Computing, Data Centre and Networking Applications

用于高性能计算、数据中心和网络应用的 FPGA 集群

• 批准号: RTI-2016-00482
• 负责人: Chow, Paul
• 金额: $ 10.9万
• 依托单位: University of Toronto
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Research Tools and Instruments
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2015-01-01 至 2016-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=591458
• 关键词: FPGA; Cluster; Performance; Computing; Data

There is a great change happening in the computing world, particularly in the "Cloud". It is driven by excessive power consumption in data centres and the need for more computing performance. In 2013 it is estimated that U.S. data centres consumed enough electricity to power New York City twice over. In June 2014, Microsoft presented a paper disclosing that they will be deploying Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) into their Bing data centres in 2015. FPGAs are a programmable chip technology that can be used to build specialized hardware circuits to do computing that contrasts with using software to implement the same functionality in a microprocessor. While FPGAs are energy efficient and offer faster computing, they are hard to use, which is why FPGAs have not been considered for mainstream computing systems until now. In June 2015, Intel announced that it is acquiring Altera, one of the two largest FPGA manufacturers. This is a monumental acknowledgement by the world's largest manufacturer of microprocessors that FPGAs will be an important part of computing going forward. In the past, Intel has adamantly stated that FPGAs would never be part of an Intel processor!! In July 2015, based on the success of their Bing experiment, Microsoft disclosed that they are investigating installing an FPGA in every one of their data centre servers, which probably numbers on the order of one million servers.

计算机世界正在发生巨大的变化，尤其是在“云”领域。它是由数据中心的过度功耗和对更高计算性能的需求驱动的。据估计，2013年美国数据中心消耗的电力足以为纽约市供电两倍。2014年6月，微软发表了一篇论文，披露他们将于2015年在必应数据中心部署现场可编程门阵列（fpga）。fpga是一种可编程芯片技术，可用于构建专门的硬件电路来进行计算，这与在微处理器中使用软件实现相同功能形成对比。虽然fpga节能且计算速度更快，但它们很难使用，这就是为什么直到现在fpga还没有被考虑用于主流计算系统的原因。2015年6月，英特尔宣布收购两家最大的FPGA制造商之一Altera。这是世界上最大的微处理器制造商对fpga将成为未来计算的重要组成部分的重大承认。在过去，英特尔坚决表示fpga永远不会成为英特尔处理器的一部分！！2015年7月，基于Bing实验的成功，微软透露他们正在研究在他们的每一台数据中心服务器上安装FPGA，这可能会达到100万台服务器的数量。