Microsoft has announced more details about their use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to accelerate servers in their massive datacenters. CEO Satya Nadella made the announcements at their Ignite Conference in Atlanta, sharing details about their five-year journey called “Project Catapult”. The surprise was not that they are using FPGAs; Microsoft had disclosed their adoption of FPGAs to accelerate BING search ranking over three years ago. What surprised many industry observers was the extent to which they are already deploying this typically esoteric style of chip and their plans for pervasive use of the technology in the future. Mr. Nadella said that the entire fleet of servers for the Azure cloud now has at least one FPGA installed in each server, delivering over one “exa op” (one billion billion operations per second) of total throughput across datacenters in 15 countries. An “ExaScale” computer in traditional HPC sense (meaning double precision math) is not expected to appear until early in the next decade.

from Forbes – Tech http://ift.tt/2cSW3HV
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