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 designed and built a composable, reconfigurable hardware fabric based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) Each server in the fabric contains one FPGA, and all FPGAs within a 48-server rack are interconnected over a low-latency, high-bandwidth networkWe describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1632 servers, and measure its effectiveness in accelerating the ranking component of the Bing web search engine We describe the requirements and architecture of the system, detail the critical engineering challenges and solutions needed to make the system robust in the presence of failures, and measure the performance, power, and resilience of the system Under high load, the large-scale reconfigurable fabric improves the ranking throughput of each server by 95% at a desirable latency distribution or reduces tail latency by 29% at a fixed throughput In other words, the reconfigurable fabric enables the same throughput using only half the number of servers

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A reconfigurable fabric for accelerating large-scale datacenter services

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, reconfigurablefabric to accelerate portions of large-scale software services. Each instantiation of the fabric consists of a 6x8 2-D torus of high-end Stratix V FPGAs embedded into a half-rack of 48 machines. One FPGA is placed into each server, accessible through PCIe, and wired directly to other FPGAs with pairs of 10 Gb SAS cablesIn this paper, we describe a medium-scale deployment of this fabric on a bed of 1,632 servers, and measure its efficacy in accelerating the Bing web search engine. We describe the requirements and architecture of the system, detail the critical engineering challenges and solutions needed to make the system robust in the presence of failures, and measure the performance, power, and resilience of the system when ranking candidate documents. Under high load, the largescale reconfigurable fabric improves the ranking throughput of each server by a factor of 95% for a fixed latency distribution--- or, while maintaining equivalent throughput, reduces the tail latency by 29%

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Hyperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability) In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and network acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds) This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft's production datacenters worldwide

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A cloud-scale acceleration architecture

Graphics processing units (GPUs) have traditionally been used in molecular modeling solely for visualization of molecular structures and animation of trajectories resulting from molecular dynamics simulations. Modern GPUs have evolved into fully programmable, massively parallel co-processors that can now be exploited to accelerate many scientific computations, typically providing about one order of magnitude speedup over CPU code and in special cases providing speedups of two orders of magnitude. This paper surveys the development of molecular modeling algorithms that leverage GPU computing, the advances already made and remaining issues to be resolved, and the continuing evolution of GPU technology that promises to become even more useful to molecular modeling. Hardware acceleration with commodity GPUs is expected to benefit the overall computational biology community by bringing teraflops performance to desktop workstations and in some cases potentially changing what were formerly batch-mode computational jobs into interactive tasks.

GPU-accelerated molecular modeling coming of age

Large-scale GPU clusters are gaining popularity in the scientific computing community. However, their deployment and production use are associated with a number of new challenges. In this paper, we present our efforts to address some of the challenges with building and running GPU clusters in HPC environments. We touch upon such issues as balanced cluster architecture, resource sharing in a cluster environment, programming models, and applications for GPU clusters.

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GPU clusters for high-performance computing

We present a heterogeneous multi-accelerator cluster developed and deployed at NCSA. The cluster consists of 16 AMD dual-core CPU compute nodes each with four NVIDIA GPUs and one Xilinx FPGA. Cluster nodes are interconnected with both InfiniBand and Ethernet networks. The software stack consists of standard cluster tools with the addition of accelerator-specific software packages and enhancements to the resource allocation and batch sub-systems. We highlight several HPC applications that have been developed and deployed on the cluster. We also present our Phoenix application development framework that is meant to help with developing new applications and migrating existing legacy codes to heterogeneous systems.

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Robert Pennington

Papers

QP: A Heterogeneous Multi-Accelerator Cluster