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Microsoft uses An FPGA NIC in every Azure server today
by amirhirsch 8y ago
Microsoft uses An FPGA NIC in every Azure server today
- baybal2 8y agoa good place to shove it: imagine how much they save on intra-dc encryption offloading, real time compression or traffic shaping
- douglasfshearer 8y agoAmazon also do similar with their ENA [0]. James Hamilton talked about it in 2016 [1]. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/introducing-elastic-network-adapter-ena-the-next-generation-network-interface-for-ec2-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/06/introduci... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA&t=1820 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyOAjFNPAbA&t=1820
- bogomipz 8y agoThe youtube link at the 35:00 mark says that the networking is an custom ASIC not an FPGA. "Amazon Annapurna ASIC" is what the slide says. Are the ENA instances using something else?
- douglasfshearer 8y agoFirst gen ENA (never publicly acknowledged AFAIK) was an FPGA, second gen is an ASIC.
- zeusk 8y agoHere are some links for Project Catapult (Microsoft Research initiative for large scale FPGA deployment in DCs) which includes Project brainwave (TPU competitor): Landing page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-cat... Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NJ-faSklzs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NJ-faSklzs Blog post: https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/the_moonshot_that_succeeded/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/the_moonshot_that_succeeded/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bogomipz 8y agoCan you say what additional processing those FGPAs in Azure are doing?