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Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

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Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#71

Post by aseipp »

errordeveloper wrote: post #38
smilekzs wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it does, this can easily sell for $10k+.

Yeah, the point is that you should need to buy any hardware even for development, which is the biggest win to me!

But having the hardware is vital. You have to test your design a lot. You're still going to need Vivado (which isn't cheap) and you'll need instance time to test the design on the real hardware with real workloads, along with any syntheiszable test benches you want to run on the hardware.

The pricing structure of the development AMI is going to be meaningful here, because it clearly includes some kind of Vivado license. It might not be as cheap as you expect, and you need to spend a lot of time with the synthesis tool to learn. The F1 machines themselves are certainly not going to be cheap at all.

If you want to learn FPGA development, you can get a board for less than $50 USD one-time cost and a fully open source toolchain for it -- check my sibling comments in this thread. Hell, if you really want, you can get a mid-range Xilinx Artix FPGA with a Vivado Design Edition voucher, and a board supporting all the features, for like $160, which is closer to what AWS is offering, and will still probably be quite cheap as a flat cost, if you're serious about learning what the tools can offer: http://store.digilentinc.com/basys-3-artix-7-fpga-trainer-bo... -- it supports almost all of the same basic device/Vivado features as the Virtex UltraScale, so "upgrading" to the Real Deal should be fine, once you're comfortable with the tools.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#72

Post by dgacmu »

XnoiVeX wrote: post #41
jordz wrote: post #20

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.

They've published papers about it -- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/configu... -- they're giving talks about it -- Mark Russinovich was here a few weeks ago with a very long talk. Doug Burger and Derek Chiou are leading a lot of these efforts, and they're absolutely for real.

I'm not sure I agree with them that this is the right path forward (but they're smart and know their stuff, so I'm probably wrong), but it's absolutely for real.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#73

Post by gnofehufo »

wmf wrote: post #60
gnofehufo wrote: post #56

Earlier 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?

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 any DB.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#74

Post by Cyph0n »

krupan wrote: post #65

For complex designs the simulator that comes with the Vivado tools (Mentor's modelsim) is not going to cut it. I wonder if they are working on deals with Mentor (or competitors Cadence and Synopsys) to license their full-featured simulators. Even better, maybe Amazon (and others getting into this space like Intel and Microsoft) will put their weight behind an open source VHDL/Verilog simulator. A few exist but they a…

> For complex designs the simulator that comes with the Vivado tools (Mentor's modelsim) is not going to cut it.

It's now called QuestaSim I believe. But are you sure it can't handle simulating large designs? If yes, what is the full-featured software from Mentor that can?

> Heck, maybe they can drive adoption of one of the up-and-coming HDL's like chisel

Chisel isn't a full-blown HDL from what I understand; it's only a DSL that compiles to Verilog. In other words, you'd still need a Verilog simulator to actually run your design.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#76

Post by ThrustVectoring »

nkkar wrote: post #63
tener wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not for the entire time, but bear in mind that the prices of cryptocurrencies fluctuate and you can spin up the VMs when it is profitable and shut them down when it isn't.

Would this mean that the currency would never fluctuate below that price point?

It's a price ceiling, not a floor. If prices go up high enough, it's worth turning on EC2 instances and paying for them with the mined cryptocurrency until prices fall. There's some wiggle room above the break-even point, since there is some delay between turning on miners receiving USD, and the miner has to eat that risk.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#77

Post by eliben »

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)

I'm not sure what you mean by the "magic" part here, can you please clarify?

[background: many years of writing VHDL specifically for FPGAs, using various dev boards and custom boards]

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#78

Post by brian-armstrong »

ranman wrote: post #70
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)

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?

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#79

Post by alfalfasprout »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #28
baybal2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wow. An app store for FPGA IPs I see people making video transcoder instances on day 1, and MPEGLA bankrupting Amazoners with lawsuits on day 2

I guess the online distribution of FPGA configurations was an eventual event?

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.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#80

Post by brian-armstrong »

gnofehufo wrote: post #73
wmf wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there other software databases that are already more than 2x faster than Mongo and don't lose data?

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?
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