A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Datacenter Services

Doug Burger, Microsoft

Portrait of Doug Burger 2010 [print size]

Abstract

Moore’s Law is dying, and will soon be dead.  This fact has enormous implications for the computing industry, from mobile devices through large-scale datacenters.  In this talk, I will describe a computational fabric designed to achieve large performance and efficiency gains for datacenter services even in the face of the end of CMOS scaling.  This fabric tightly couples many FPGAs together via a high-speed, low-latency secondary network, and permits elastic allocation of groups of reconfigurable chips to support varied services.  I will also describe the implementation of an accelerated web search service on this fabric.

Bio

Doug Burger is a Director in Microsoft Research’s Technologies division, where he leads an interdisciplinary team focused on innovations in datacenter design and services, as well as new computing experiences in the mobile and wearable spaces.  Before joining Microsoft in 2008, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-led the TRIPS project which invented EDGE architectures and NUCA caches.  He is a Fellow of both the ACM and the IEEE.

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