Microsoft is developing "Project Catapult" with server programmable chip (FPGA)

FPGAMachines that are composed of clusters (field rewritable gate arrays)Experience performance equivalent to 2000 dual core CPUsThere is a story saying. Microsoft is also looking at FPGAs and is pushing for "Project Catapult" with FPGA on the server, and in fact Bing and Micorosoft Azure are supported by this power.

Project Catapult - Microsoft Research
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/


Microsoft's Internet Business Gets a New Kind of Processor | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/microsoft-bets-future-chip-reprogram-fly/

Microsoft has developed numerous Internet businesses including Bing of search engines, Azure of cloud computing services, but "Project Catapult" supports these businesses.

In the FPGA, Microsoft has been looking since as soon as possible, and researchers meet with Bing's officials in 2010 to speed up Bing's indexing service using FPGAs.

In 2011, software engineers and researchers join the project in large numbers in order to tackle the big problem of how to actually utilize the FPGA in speeding up. In 2012, a pilot version was built with the FPGA mounted on 1632 servers and connecting them to a special secondary network. As a result, good ROI (investment efficiency) was obtained, and a path to commercialization was opened.

What is currently being done is to integrate FPGAs into nearly all Microsoft data center servers built with decentralized design. Integration of FPGAs on each data center server, not individual clusters, creates an "accelerating structure" everywhere. Being a reorganizable and versatile "accelerating structure" brings flexibility to accommodate the case of using a single FPGA to the case of using several thousand FPGAs in a single service.

By promoting this Project Catapult, we have succeeded in reducing the cost by 30% and saving 10% compared with CPU.

For Microsoft, a software-based company, this kind of hardware improvement should not be so easy, but Mr. Doug Leader, who is proceeding with the project, said that rather than talking to then CEO Steve Ballmer Before he was working on the team for two years with Mr. Riki who is in charge of Bing.

As of 2014, the budget that Microsoft spent on hardware in the online field was about 5 billion dollars a year (about 500 billion yen) to 6 billion dollars (about 600 billion yen), but Satya Nadera CEO We recognized that it was the top priority and promoted it. Although Altera is the company that manufactures FPGAs, Intel acquired Altera as a chip maker in 2015 with a record $ 16.7 billion (about 1.6 trillion yen) in line with this trend Things.

From now on, Project Catapult is believed to contribute to the expansion of computing power of Microsoft's supercomputer until 2030, Peter Lee, vice president of Microsoft Research,Quantum computationI will tell the future that it will approach.