Azure will be next I guess. They're already using FPGA based systems to power Bing and their Cognitive Services.
That's just anecdotal. No one has seen it. The Wired article sounded like content marketing.
Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
41–50 of 212 posts
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#42> Today we are launching a developer preview of the new F1 instance. In addition to building applications and services for your own use, you will be able to package them up for sale and reuse in AWS Marketplace. Wow. An app store for FPGA IPs and the infrastructure to enable anyone to use it. That's really cool.
I guess this will be a game changer for FPGA-mineable digital currencies. Maybe not for Bitcoin, because people have invested heavily into dedicated mining hardware, but I'm interested to see what it'll do for the smaller altcoins.
For any cryptocurrency that's profitably mineable on AWS the difficulty immediately increases to the point that it's no longer profitable.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#43I'd be interested in practical use cases that come to your mind (like someone who commented about genomics data processing for a university).
What could YOU use this for professionally?
(I certainly always wanted to play around with an FPGA for fun...)
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#44> Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P fabricated using a 16 nm process. > 64 GiB of ECC-protected memory on a 288-bit wide bus (four DDR4 channels). > Dedicated PCIe x16 interface to the CPU. Does anyone know whether this is likely to be a plug-in card? and can I buy one to plug in to a local machine for testing?
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Intel already have a compression library as a proof of concept that shows a large benefit. The JVM compiler knows A) how many instructions each method is and B) how CPU hot it is. Just with a compression library, the compiler could identify very hot and very small methods and test them on the FPGA, in parallel to normal execution, and measure the performance difference, and switch to the FPGA if it was beneficial (wh…
That compression library offloads compression to a dedicated FPGA implementation of the compression algorithm, not a translated version of the same code that runs on the CPU. Approaches do exist to automatically translate some types of code to run on an FPGA, though.
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.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#46Does this mean that ML on FPGA's will be more common? Can someone comment on viability of this? Would there be speedup and if so would it be large enough to warrant rewriting it all in VHDL/Verilog?
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#47> Today we are launching a developer preview of the new F1 instance. In addition to building applications and services for your own use, you will be able to package them up for sale and reuse in AWS Marketplace. Wow. An app store for FPGA IPs and the infrastructure to enable anyone to use it. That's really cool.
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 this right now. This morning. Waiting for the damn 404 to go away on:
https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga
This reduces the barrier to entry. It also reduces the transaction cost (h/t Ronald Coase).
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#48If 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 really cool. Do you think it will be possible to run MongoDB on an FPGA anytime soon?
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#49If 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 very awesome. Could you add some more thoughts on the tooling and the development workflow? Is it possible to target the Xilinx hardware using only open source (or AWS proprietary) tools? Or is Vivado still required for advanced stuff?
The press release says:
"This AMI includes a set of developer tools that you can use in the AWS Cloud at no charge. You write your FPGA code using VHDL or Verilog and then compile, simulate, and verify it using tools from the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite (you can also use third-party simulators, higher-level language compilers, graphical programming tools, and FPGA IP libraries)."
So basically, buying a copy of Vivado is the minimum. There aren't any open source tools that directly output Xilinx FPGA bitstreams that I know of.
Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware
#50If 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)
Exactly what I thought. This is amazing. FPGA is commonly used in embedded systems to perform application specific tasks and now application developers have access to this power too. I guess many machine learning application might take profit of that power instead of using comparatively very expensive graphics hardware.