Digital Logic & Design DA-1

Datacenters integrates an FPGA into a unique

distributed architecture
FPGA(Field programmable gate array) is a kind of integrated circuit,
which comes under semiconductor devices, that can be programmed as
per the end user’s needs using a hardware programming language.
According to Moore’s law, the number of transistors in a dense
integrated circuit doubles about every two years. However, this rate has
slowed recently. But the workload for datacenters has been increasing.
This workload is in the form of model serving, data processing, etc. Since
FPGAs can be customised, we can obtain both power maximisation and
high performance from them. This makes FPGAs very desirable in
datacenter and cloud-based computation.

One of the major areas in which FPGAs help in reducing power

consumption is by increasing the efficiency of data transfer. In other
integrated circuits, transferring data from the storage to the processing
unit itself uses a lot of power. The effect is greater when the
architecture is more complicated. This power that is used up is
essentially wasted and the amount needs to be curbed. Another issue is
that the performance provided by the accelerator in the system is used
up by the process of data transfer thereby decreasing the usability of the
same. FPGAs come in very handy to solve these issues. As we know,
FPGAs can be customised as per the requirement. This can help us to
decrease the complexity of the data transfer route by customising it for
each application. This can help reduce the power consumed as well as
the performance. One might argue that ASICs (application specific
integrated circuits) are better. But these circuits are not transferable like
FPGAs which can be used for other purposes as well. Also, the
redundancy in the processes can be decreased and hence, the resources
can be saved. Research shows that FPGAs use ten times less energy than
CPUs or GPUs. The effect is greater if the system is meticulously
integrated.

When FPGAs were first invented, they were mainly used for circuit
design, network management, etc. Today, they are being used as
processing elements rather than side support system. This has enabled
us to use different types of architectures and try various combinations to
suit different purposes. A lot of improvements are being made in FPGAs
lately to make them more desirable, for example, larger capacity, higher
clock rates, higher memory bandwidth and more functionality. Another
solution is to use only FPGAs as the main system; i.e. without the CPUs.
If these are directly connected to the network, the entire structure can
be easily adjusted as per the necessity. Subsequently, multiple FPGAs
can be used cascadingly to form a wide network. Research shows that
such systems give much better performance on various levels as
compared to the other systems.

References
A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-scale Datacenter
Services
A. Putnam, A. M. Caulfield, E. S. Chung, et al.
41 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA),
st

2014

A Cloud-Scale Acceleration Architecture

A. M. Caulfield, E. S. Chung, A. Putnam, et al.
49 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO),
th

2016

Network-Attached FPGAs for Data Center Applications

Jagath Weerasinghe, Raphael Polig, Francois Abel, Christoph Hagleitner
IBM Research - Zurich

Enabling FPGAs in Hyperscale Data Centers

Jagath Weerasinghe, Francois Abel, Christoph Hagleitner
IBM Research - Zurich