FPGAs for Servers

The confluence of the end of Dennard scaling and the rapid rise in the demand for data- and compute-intensive processing have given rise to an arms race for achieving the highest throughput at the lowest power consumption.  In this environment, special-purpose accelerators have skyrocketed in popularity.  However, the integration of accelerators, which has traditionally been done in the embedded systems domain, remains a challenging open problem in the context of datacenters.  In particular, integration of FPGAs, which are among the most promising accelerator technologies available today, is nascent.  This project develops methods for FPGA accelerator integration that treats the FPGA as a first-class citizen in a server environment.