Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

Post by CamperBob2 » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 10:39 PM UTC

op00to wrote: post #116

brian-armstrong wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't justify buying it but you can justify renting it? Has your department heard of amortization?

Most research finance departments are absolutely horrified at OpEx because any strange non-capital expenditure makes them look less efficient than the next research institute. This comes in handy when two labs are up for a grant, and they are equally qualified. The more efficient institute gets the grant. You can imagine asking for the lab credit card for EC2 time is not met with enthusiasm.

Post by cheez » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 10:42 PM UTC

1024core wrote: post #117

I'm a total FPGA n00b, so here's a dumb question: what can you do with this FPGA that you can't with a GPU? OK, here's a concrete question: I have a vector of 64 floats. I want to multiply it with a matrix of size 64xN, where N is on the order of 1 billion. How fast can I do this multiplication, and find the top K elements of the resulting N-dimensional array?

Post by baybal2 » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 10:54 PM UTC

problems wrote: post #97

alfalfasprout wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already a thing. Plenty of marketplaces exist for FPGA IPs. It's just not that well known because high end FGPAs run $7k+ and complex IP cores can be $20k+ for a license.

So if you were to get a cheap license via a service like this, do you get access to the VHDL or equivalent or could you extract it in some way?

Post by duskwuff » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 10:57 PM UTC

CalChris wrote: post #47

ChargingWookie wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this is incredible for fpga users. There is now a market for freelance fpga developers

Yes this is cool if you're already using FPGAs and yeah, there will be a market for FPGA designers. But I also think this is FPGAs for the Rest of Us . Suddenly, FPGAs are available without having to buy some development board from Xilinx, install a toolchain, use said (shitty) toolchain ... Me, I was thinking of FPGAs as being something I'd use down the road a few years, eventually, etc. But instead, I'm looking at…

Post by cma » Wed, Nov 30, 2016, 11:04 PM UTC

ranman wrote: post #2

If 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)