A Greater Boston RIG project

As modern data center workloads become increasingly complex, constrained and critical, mainstream “CPU-centric” computing can no longer keep pace. Future data centers are moving towards a more fluid model, with computation and communication no longer localized to commodity CPUs and routers. Next generation “data-centric” data centers will “compute everywhere,” whether data is stationary (in memory) or on the move (in network). Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), are transforming ordinary clouds into massive supercomputers. This project highlights many ways to deploy FPGAs in a data center node, such as traditional back-end accelerators, tightly coupled off-load processors, Smart NICs, Bump-in-the-Wire, and even in the router itself.