Designing and Programming the Configurable Cloud

Process technology improvements have historically allowed an effortless expansion of the capacity and capabilities of computers and the cloud with few changes to the underlying software or programming model. However, the end of Dennard Scaling means that performance and efficiency gains will rely on the customization of the hardware for each application. Yet customizing hardware for each application runs contrary to the trend to moving more and more applications to a common hardware infrastructure the Cloud. Microsofts Catapult project has brought the power and performance of FPGA-based reconfigurable computing to hyperscale datacenters, accelerating major production cloud applications such as Bing web search and Microsoft Azure, and enabling a new generation of machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. These diverse workloads are accelerated using the same underlying hardware by using highly programmable silicon. The presence of ubiquitous and programmable silicon in the datacenter enables a new era of hardware/software co-design across a wide variety of workloads, opening up affordable and efficient performance across an enormous set of workloads. Catapult is now deployed in nearly every new server across the more than a million machines that make up the Microsoft hyperscale cloud. In this talk, I will describe the next generation of the Catapult configurable cloud architecture, and the tools and techniques that have made Catapult successful to date. I will discuss areas where traditional hardware and software development flows fall short, the domains where this programmable hardware holds the most potential, and how this technology can enable new computing frontiers.