Are these custom fpgas or an Altera or Xylinx?
Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
101–110 of 212 posts
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems as though you could use a tracing jit approach to offload hot loops to an FPGA very generically. Though it'd have to be a really long-running loop to outweigh the substantial overhead in synthesizing the logic gates.
You can't just find hotspots; you have to find hotspots whose data set is sufficiently disjoint between the FPGA and the CPU. With the right architecture (such as Intel's Xeon+FPGA package), you can have an incredibly fast interconnect, but it's still not the speed of the CPU's register file, so you can't hand off data with that granularity. You can get more than enough bandwidth, but the latency would crater your pe…
It's cool to know it's an area of active research. I wonder if there are also power consumption ramifications though. While e.g. AES-NI is incomparable performance-wise, my novice (perhaps incorrect) understanding is that ARM beats x86 power consumption by having a drastically simpler instruction set.
Could a simple ARM-like instruction set plus a generic "synthesize and send this loopy junk to FPGA" have power implications without a major performance impact on cloud servers? (Yeah I know this is likely a topic for hundreds of PhD theses, but is that something being investigated too?)
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm currently working on this. Speedup around 2x for most operations. Not kidding, quite a few startups are currently trying to optimize typical data operations with special algorithms.
Aren't there other software databases that are already more than 2x faster than Mongo and don't lose data?
Sure, but they aren't Web Scale!
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latencies from AWS servers to the exchanges probably would make HFT applications unfeasible.
Not when you use Amazon's new regions, us-fin-1, that is within the exchange's datacenter. /s?
for a moment I got super excited and thought us-fin-1 was real then saw that trailing slash indicating sarcasm.
maybe we'll see High Frequency Trading For The Masses sort of situation in the future that wipes out profits for existing guys although it seems unlikely seeing how arbitrage opportunities are all automated by large capital holders.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you guys are curious about these announcements I'll be recapping them and going into more detail on twitch.tv/aws at 12:30 pacific
Huh? Isn't Twitch just for gaming content?
What others have said is true, and also note that Amazon bought Twitch 2 years ago, so I'm sure Amazon can run their own product announcements through Twitch if they want :)
EDIT: updated when amazon bought twitch, woops
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a product announcement, though
And Twitch have had TV Shows streamed on it in the past https://www.twitch.tv/whoismrrobot My guess that was a sponsored deal or something. But as my edit from before it seems that re:invent is being streamed on Twitch anyway so guessing its all above board (and as others have said Amazon owns Twitch).
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Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe, I'm not talking about Mongo specifically. You can find 'equivalents' to CPU data structures for FPGAs and speed up operations on/with them while still saving power. There's lots of trouble with how buffers are used and memory is accessed. So it's not a trivial task, but IF you can optimize generic data structures and replace the existing ones you basically have 2x the speed or half the energy consumption for a…
But what's the developer time/cost for that?
Totally depends on your use case.
From the blog post:
> From here, I would be able to test my design, package it up as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and then use it for my own applications or list it in AWS Marketplace.
As a user of those Marketplace images, you just look at the hourly fees. Your team needs to set this up, of course, and replace the old stuff, e.g. MongoDB with a new, sped-up FPGA-MongoDB. (And you'd need to fix some new bugs.)
If time is super-critical to you, e.g. if you're working with analytics: do you really need to speed up your processing pipeline? E.g. processing stuff not once but twice per day? If yes, then you'd better off having people on your team who understand all this and are able to fix and implement stuff themselves. Second scenario would be quite a bit more expensive, but still, FPGAs aren't rocket science and there's no way around them in the future.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#108Quick Question: If anyone wants to learn programming an FPGA is learning C only way to go ? how hard is to learn and program in verilog/VHDL without electrical background ? If anyone suggests links or books, please do Thank You
C won't help you here; the Verilog/VHDL model is very different from normal languages due to intrinsic parallelism and the different techniques you need to use - you can't allocate anything at runtime, for example. As well as language quirks like '=' vs '=>' which trip up beginners.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#109Anyone have a hardware ZLIB implementation that I can drop into my Python toolchains as a direct replacement for ZLIB to compress web-server responses with no latency?
Could also use a fast JPG encoder/decoder as well.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#110If you don't click through to read about this: you can write an FPGA image in verilog/VHDL and upload it... and then run it. To me that seems like magic. HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga (I work for AWS)
This is so awesome, I can't even. I wrote arachne-pnr [0] to learn about FPGAs to get ready for this day. Just signed up, can't way to play with these!
I hope the growing popularity of FPGAs for general-purpose computing will help push the vendors to open up bitstreams and invest in open-source design tools.