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)
that repository is 404?
Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
131–140 of 212 posts
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I would not count on these instances being useful for development. The parts Amazon is using cost somewhere between $30K and $50K each. Hourly costs will be substantial -- it will likely be cheaper to buy an entry-level development board than to spin up an F1 instance every time you want to run your design.
(post author here)
You can do all of the design and simulation on any EC2 instance with enough memory and cores. You don't have to run the dev toolchain on the target instance type.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Twitch is excellent for all kinds of live content.
https://www.twitch.tv/p/rules-of-conduct "All content that is neither gaming-related nor permitted under the rules for Twitch Creative Conduct is prohibited from broadcast."
Amazon might just let Amazon talking about their products slide ;)
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#134Anyone 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.
Given that your EC2 Web server is limited to 20 Gbps, you're probably better off using Intel zlib and choosing the right compression level tradeoff. If you're willing to pay a fortune for 100 Gbps of zlib then the FPGA might be more appropriate.
For JPEG the GPU instances might be better.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vivado is required for all advanced features and programming Xilinx chips in general; like the sibling post said, there is no open FPGA toolchain implementation for Xilinx devices, especially for extremely high end ones like the ones being offered on the F1 (I expect they'd run at like, several thousand USD per device, on top of a several thousand dollar Vivado license for all the features). It doesn't look like ther…
> I expect they'd run at like, several thousand USD per device... You're guessing about an order of magnitude too low, actually. The VU9P FPGAs Amazon is using cost between $30,000 and $55,000 each , depending on the speed grade. Yes, this means a fully equipped F1 instance costs nearly half a million dollars. Don't count on the instances being cheap to run.
Do you have a source? I am curious. http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/xilinx-inc/XCKU040-... this surely is not the right chip then.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#136These FPGAs are absolutely _massive_ (in terms of available resources). AWS isn't messing around.
To put things into practical perspective my company sells an FPGA based solution that applies our video enhancement technology in real-time to any video streams up to 1080p60 (our consumer product handles HDMI in and out). It's a world class algorithm with complex calculations, generating 3D information and saliency maps on the fly. I crammed that beast into a Cyclone 4 with 40K LEs.
It's hard to translate the "System Logic Cells" metric that Xilinx uses to measure these FPGAs, but a pessimistic calculation puts it at about 1.1 million LEs. That's over 27 times the logic my real-time video enhancement algorithm uses. With just one of these FPGAs we could run our algorithm on 6 4K60 4:4:4 streams at once. That's insane.
For another estimation, my rough calculations show that each FPGA would be able to do about 7 GH/s mining Bitcoin. Not an impressive figure by today's standards, but back when FPGA mining was a thing the best I ever got out of an FPGA was 500 MH/s per chip (on commercially viable devices).
I'm very curious what Amazon is going to charge for these instances. FPGAs of that size are incredibly expensive (5 figures each). Xilinx no doubt gave them a special deal, in exchange for the opportunity to participate in what could be a very large market. AWS has the potential to push a lot of volume for FPGAs that traditionally had very poor volume. IntelFPGA will no doubt fight exceptionally hard to win business from Azure or Google Cloud.
* Take all these estimates with a grain of salt. Most recent "advancements" in FPGA density are the result of using tricky architectures. FPGAs today are still homogeneous logic, but don't tend to be as fine grained as they were. In other words, they're basically moving from RISC to CISC. So it's always up in the air how well all the logic cells can be utilized for a given algorithm.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#137Anyone 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.
Given that your EC2 Web server is limited to 20 Gbps, you're probably better off using Intel zlib and choosing the right compression level tradeoff. If you're willing to pay a fortune for 100 Gbps of zlib then the FPGA might be more appropriate. For JPEG the GPU instances might be better.
The problem is the latency associated with software Zlib, on the order of several milliseconds for a typical web response, and the CPU usage the entails, thereby limiting web request-response throughput.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I expect they'd run at like, several thousand USD per device... You're guessing about an order of magnitude too low, actually. The VU9P FPGAs Amazon is using cost between $30,000 and $55,000 each , depending on the speed grade. Yes, this means a fully equipped F1 instance costs nearly half a million dollars. Don't count on the instances being cheap to run.
Do you have a source? I am curious. http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/xilinx-inc/XCKU040-... this surely is not the right chip then.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
Scroll down to "F1"; it says:
> Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P FPGAs
The VU9P isn't available through DigiKey, but is listed by Avnet. I don't know which specific package and speed grade Amazon is using, but here's one:
https://products.avnet.com/shop/en/asia/programmable-logic/f...
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#139For my institute this is going to be _really_ useful for Genomics data processing because we can't justify buying expensive hardware for undergrad research. Using a FPGA hardware over cloud sounds almost magical!
Wouldn't bandwidth/transfer costs basically nullify the computing gains? I know someone who used to be in genomics and cloud-anything was priced-out due to transfer costs.