An FPGA Platform for Hyperscalers

FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are making their way into data centers (DC). They are used as accelerators to boost the compute power of individual server nodes and to improve the overall power efficiency. Meanwhile, DC infrastructures are being redesigned to pack ever more compute capacity into the same volume and power envelopes. This redesign leads to the disaggregation of the server and its resources into a collection of standalone computing, memory, and storage modules. To embrace this evolution, we developed a platform that decouples the FPGA from the CPU of the server by connecting the FPGA directly to the DC network. This proposal turns the FPGA into a disaggregated standalone computing resource that can be deployed at large scale into emerging hyperscale data centers. This paper describes an infrastructure which integrates 64 FPGAs (Kintex* UltraScale* XCKU060) from Xilinx' in a 19" x 2U1 chassis, and provides a bi-sectional bandwidth of 640 Gb/s. The platform is designed for cost effectiveness and makes use of hot-water cooling for optimized energy efficiency. As a result, a DC rack can fit 16 platforms, for a total of 1024 FPGAs + 16 TB of DRR4 memory.