I'm just starting to learn the Project Icestorm tools as an FPGA beginner (using the Nandland Go board). I'm just a hobbyist, but I'm really interested in seein

I'm just starting to learn the Project Icestorm tools as an FPGA beginner (using the Nandland Go board). I'm just a hobbyist, but I'm really interested in seeing how FPGAs can be used for custom hardware acceleration. These days you can't hear anything about the cloud without hearing about FPGAs being used for acceleration, but all the big companies are pretty tight lipped about the details of what they're actually doing with them. Realistically, could I take a frequently used C library, implement it as a hardware function in an FPGA, and integrate that with my computer via PCI Express, or USB 3 etc., and actually get a speed improvement?