307 karma · joined June 21, 2018
How does reducing the number to the wealthy help here? In Germany at least, your insurance will surely not pay for this.
Margins are so high in this sector, why should they prey on the hopeless to turn a bit more profit, when they'll make huge ones anyways once the drug is finalized?
They present four papers in total that shed light on developments and deployments of FPGAs in data centers:
Project Catapult (Bing/Microsoft):
First paper:
> [...] provides insights into the development process of FPGA base systems. The target application is accelerating the Bing web search engine. [...] The paper shows how such a system can improve the throughput of document ranking or reduce the tail latency for such operations by 29 percent.
Second paper:
> The web-search accelerator was based on a unit of 48 machines, a result of the decision to use a torus network to connect the FPGAs to each other. Not only is the cabling of such units cumbersome, but it also limits how many FPGAs can talk to each other and requires routing to be provided in each FPGA, complex procedures to achieve fault tolerance, etc. [..] Hence, the second paper describes the solution being deployed in Azure: the FPGA is placed between the NIC (network interface controller) of the host and the actual network, as well as having a PCI connection to the host.
The other two papers debate whether FPGAs could actually be implemented using ASICs or other dedicated hardware. To do so, they discuss how FPGAs can be used in MySQL with a SSD+FPGA storage engine.