FPGAs in the datacenter

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This presentation (click here to open it):

shows that FPGAs are not only doing their way into DCs as accelerators to boost computing tasks, but also to handle typical DC tasks as networking or storage. As an example, XILINX’s strategy "Datacenter first" (presented in the XDF 2019) bets for distributed adaptive computing where FPGAs are used for network acceleration (i.e. CPUs with SmartNICs), storage acceleration (i.e. FPGA computational storage), and computing acceleration (i.e. with FPGA/ACAP acceleration):

As seen above, XILINX’s vision is to bring FPGAs in the datacenter. However, in their roadmap, they assume that only that will be possible if FPGAs are network-attached. Unfortunately for XILINX (and all other vendors), their solutions are all PCIe-attached:

On the other hand, we have the cloudFPGA. As shown in the overview, IBM’s platform is unique because it exposes stand-alone and DC network-attached FPGAs (just as XILINX vision!) ready for storage and computing acceleration today.