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

计算世界正在发生巨大的变化，特别是在“云”上。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次以上。2014年6月，微软发表了一篇论文，披露他们将在2015年将现场可编程门阵列（FPGA）部署到其Bing数据中心。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，这与使用软件在微处理器中实现相同功能形成对比。虽然FPGA是节能的，并提供更快的计算，但它们很难使用，这就是为什么FPGA直到现在还没有被考虑用于主流计算系统。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一个里程碑式的认可。在过去，英特尔坚定地表示，FPGA永远不会成为英特尔处理器的一部分！！2015年7月，基于必应实验的成功，微软透露他们正在研究在每一台数据中心服务器上安装FPGA，这可能是100万台服务器的数量级。

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.