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

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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.