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)
HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga
(I work for AWS)
I hope the growing popularity of FPGAs for general-purpose computing will help push the vendors to open up bitstreams and invest in open-source design tools.
FWIW, Clifford has recently started reversing the bits of the modern Xilinx FPGA series. So, stay tuned for a Xilinx IceStorm-equivalent sometime down the road (a few years, probably...)
"All content that is neither gaming-related nor permitted under the rules for Twitch Creative Conduct is prohibited from broadcast."
While its mainly Game dev or game dev related its not limited to game dev stuff. From their FAQ https://help.twitch.tv/customer/portal/articles/2176641
Examples of what you can broadcast on Twitch Creative:
...
Programming and coding
Software and game development
Web development
My guess that was a sponsored deal or something. But as my edit from before it seems that re:invent is being streamed on Twitch anyway so guessing its all above board (and as others have said Amazon owns Twitch).
EDIT: updated when amazon bought twitch, woops
[background: many years of writing VHDL specifically for FPGAs, using various dev boards and custom boards]
To the best of our knowledge, state-of-the-art performance for forward propagation of CNNs on FPGAs was achieved by a team at Microsoft. Ovtcharov et al. have reported a throughput of 134 images/second on the ImageNet 1K dataset [28], which amounts to roughly 3x the throughput of the next closest competitor, while operating at 25 W on a Stratix V D5 [30]. This performance is projected to increase by using top-of-the-line FPGAs, with an estimated through- put of roughly 233 images/second while consuming roughly the same power on an Arria 10 GX1150. This is com- pared to high-performing GPU implementations (Caffe + cuDNN), which achieve 500-824 images/second, while con- suming 235 W. Interestingly, this was achieved using Micros oft- designed FPGA boards and servers, an experimental project which integrates FPGAs into datacenter applications.
"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.
So I guess the real question is: what exactly is granted by the Vivado license on these AMIs? Do we get things like SDSoC, SDAccel, etc, and all the libraries? [1] The blog seems to imply you can program these things with OpenCL too (AKA SDAccel), so I'm guessing that these features are all enabled, but details about the included Vivado license in the AMI would be nice.
[1]: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado.html#buy
It doesn't look like there's much AWS proprietary stuff here, though we'd have to wait for the SDK to be opened properly to be sure. I imagine it's mostly just making all of the stuff prepackaged and easily consumable for usage, and maybe some extra IP Cores or something for common stuff, and lots of examples. If you're already using Vivado I imagine using the F1/Cloud won't introduce any kind of major changes to what you expect.
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.
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...
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.
From the blog post:
> From here, I would be able to test my design, package it up as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and then use it for my own applications or list it in AWS Marketplace.
As a user of those Marketplace images, you just look at the hourly fees. Your team needs to set this up, of course, and replace the old stuff, e.g. MongoDB with a new, sped-up FPGA-MongoDB. (And you'd need to fix some new bugs.)
If time is super-critical to you, e.g. if you're working with analytics: do you really need to speed up your processing pipeline? E.g. processing stuff not once but twice per day? If yes, then you'd better off having people on your team who understand all this and are able to fix and implement stuff themselves. Second scenario would be quite a bit more expensive, but still, FPGAs aren't rocket science and there's no way around them in the future.