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There is no reason for microsoft not to expose the fabric to customers of Azure. I am sure there are applications out there which can benefit by being able to s

There is no reason for microsoft not to expose the fabric to customers of Azure. I am sure there are applications out there which can benefit by being able to synthesize their own code just like microsoft did for its bing search traffic etc.,

aseipp 10y ago
Of course there are reasons not to expose it, what are you talking about? Support, reliability, isolation, debuggability, and platform control are a few reasons (it would be a goddamn nightmare to debug these things remotely, not to mention provide support for them through traditional channels -- and let's not even begin thinking about the security nightmare it could imply to do things like securely provision FPGAs on demand, or wipe them after the fact. Bare-metal cloud providers already have a lot to do here, because the threat model involves people who can do shit like flash your BIOS or attack your firmware). If these aren't a challenge for you, and FPGA development would actually pay off economically -- you're already in a decidedly different market than the vast majority of Azure customers. Even then, there's also no indication it would actually be profitable for them - FPGAs are actually quite niche in their applications and require extensive development cycles in order to utilize to their full potential, especially for complex tasks. Microsoft and Azure employees can justify this because of economies of scale as of right now. It's a labor intensive process -- there's no indication a vast majority of applications would find a good use case for developing their own fabric, one that would offset the costs. What's more likely is that people like Microsoft and Google will start offering you serves that are powered by this stuff under the hood, to give their platforms a competitive advantage. A better SQL server enhanced with custom logic is far more valuable to the vast majority of their customers than being able to program some custom fabric themselves, in today's world. Microsoft already has custom fabricated Xeons with unlocked silicon for example, giving them private functionality to accelerate things like SDN workloads, and those Xeons power Azure -- why aren't you being given access to those? For the same reasons: those features only make sense to support, develop and utilize at a certain scale for the involved parties -- and it gives them competitive advantages when used to accelerate traditional workloads (that can only be realized with a substantial amount of work on part of the vendor, but is "free" for the customers.) The venn diagram of "People who have a problem which FPGAs would solve" and "Customers who desire commodity cloud computing on Azure" is extremely small. That could change one day, but it doesn't look like it's set to change anytime in the near future, especially given the landscape of EDA tooling, and the fundamentally different cost models associated with hardware vs software development.
- webaholic 10y ago
  And how is any of that different from providing GPUs in the cloud? I am not saying that they provide them for free. They can charge for all of that support and tools. We haven't reached a stage where fpgas make economical sense for small customers. GPUs were in the same stage 5 years ago. I hope Microsoft becomes a trail blazer in bringing fpgas on par with GPUs. They have one of the best tool-chain teams working for them, so it is doable.
  - tw04 10y ago
    A GPU doesn't have custom (potentially proprietary) logic programmed into it. It's the same reason we have shared CPUs but not FPGAs.
  - monocasa 10y ago
    GPUs had their own MMUs five years ago for running user shaders.

aseipp 10y ago

Of course there are reasons not to expose it, what are you talking about? Support, reliability, isolation, debuggability, and platform control are a few reasons (it would be a goddamn nightmare to debug these things remotely, not to mention provide support for them through traditional channels -- and let's not even begin thinking about the security nightmare it could imply to do things like securely provision FPGAs on demand, or wipe them after the fact. Bare-metal cloud providers already have a lot to do here, because the threat model involves people who can do shit like flash your BIOS or attack your firmware). If these aren't a challenge for you, and FPGA development would actually pay off economically -- you're already in a decidedly different market than the vast majority of Azure customers. Even then, there's also no indication it would actually be profitable for them - FPGAs are actually quite niche in their applications and require extensive development cycles in order to utilize to their full potential, especially for complex tasks. Microsoft and Azure employees can justify this because of economies of scale as of right now. It's a labor intensive process -- there's no indication a vast majority of applications would find a good use case for developing their own fabric, one that would offset the costs. What's more likely is that people like Microsoft and Google will start offering you serves that are powered by this stuff under the hood, to give their platforms a competitive advantage. A better SQL server enhanced with custom logic is far more valuable to the vast majority of their customers than being able to program some custom fabric themselves, in today's world. Microsoft already has custom fabricated Xeons with unlocked silicon for example, giving them private functionality to accelerate things like SDN workloads, and those Xeons power Azure -- why aren't you being given access to those? For the same reasons: those features only make sense to support, develop and utilize at a certain scale for the involved parties -- and it gives them competitive advantages when used to accelerate traditional workloads (that can only be realized with a substantial amount of work on part of the vendor, but is "free" for the customers.) The venn diagram of "People who have a problem which FPGAs would solve" and "Customers who desire commodity cloud computing on Azure" is extremely small. That could change one day, but it doesn't look like it's set to change anytime in the near future, especially given the landscape of EDA tooling, and the fundamentally different cost models associated with hardware vs software development.

webaholic 10y ago
And how is any of that different from providing GPUs in the cloud? I am not saying that they provide them for free. They can charge for all of that support and tools. We haven't reached a stage where fpgas make economical sense for small customers. GPUs were in the same stage 5 years ago. I hope Microsoft becomes a trail blazer in bringing fpgas on par with GPUs. They have one of the best tool-chain teams working for them, so it is doable.
- tw04 10y ago
  A GPU doesn't have custom (potentially proprietary) logic programmed into it. It's the same reason we have shared CPUs but not FPGAs.
- monocasa 10y ago
  GPUs had their own MMUs five years ago for running user shaders.