Accelerating Datacenter Services with Reconfigurable Logic

Aaron Smith (Microsoft Research, USA)

Datacenter workloads demand high computational capabilities, flexibility, power efficiency, and low cost. It is challenging to improve all of these factors simultaneously. To advance datacenter capabilities beyond what commodity server designs can provide, we have designed and built a composable, reconfigurable fabric at Microsoft to accelerate portions of large-scale software services. In this talk I will describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and discuss its efficacy in accelerating the Bing web search engine along with future plans to improve the programmability of the fabric.

Bio:
Aaron Smith is a member of the Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research. He is broadly interested in optimizing compilers, computer architecture and reconfigurable computing. Over the past 15 years he has led multiple industrial and research compiler projects at Metrowerks/Freescale Semiconductor, The University of Texas at Austin and Microsoft. He received his PhD in Computer Science from UT-Austin in 2009 and is currently serving as co-General Chair of CGO 2015.