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The cloudFPGA platform is an FPGA-accelerator based on the DOME MicroDataCenter, an independent project inside IBM:

As we can read on Wikipedia, DOME is a Dutch government-funded project between IBM and ASTRON in form of a public-private to develop technology roadmaps targeting the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the world's largest planned radio telescope. 

A common misconception is that microservers offer only low performance. This is caused by the first microservers being based on Atoms or early 32bit ARM cores. The aim of the DOME MicroDataCenter project is to deliver high performance at low cost and low power. A key characteristic of a MicroDataCenter is its packaging: a very small form factor that allows short communication distances.

The cloudFPGA research team lead by François Abel took benefit of the IBM in-house DOME MicroDataCenter project to replace CPU-Modules with FPGA-Modules to go even further on the computing capabilities of the platform.