From Research to Proof-of-Concept: Analysis of a Deployment of FPGAs on a Commercial Search Engine
Fabio Maschi, Gustavo Alonso, Anthony Hock-Koon, Nicolas Bondoux,, Teddy Roy, Mourad Boudia, Matteo Casalino

TL;DR
This paper analyzes the practical challenges and performance implications of deploying FPGAs in a commercial search engine, highlighting the importance of software integration and balanced architecture for realizing FPGA benefits.
Contribution
It provides an in-depth case study of FPGA integration in a real-world search engine, revealing key issues and practical considerations for effective deployment.
Findings
Performance gains are reduced if request submission is not optimized.
Imbalanced architecture can negate FPGA benefits and increase costs.
Significant software changes may be required for optimal FPGA utilization.
Abstract
FPGAs are quickly becoming available in the cloud as a one more heterogeneous processing element complementing CPUs and GPUs. There are many reports in the literature showing the potential for FPGAs to accelerate a wide variety of algorithms, which combined with their growing availability, would seem to also indicate a widespread use in many applications. Unfortunately, there is not much published research exploring what it takes to integrate an FPGA into an existing application in a cost-effective way and keeping the algorithmic performance advantages. Building on recent results exploring how to employ FPGAs to improve the search engines used in the travel industry, this paper analyses the end-to-end performance of the search engine when using FPGAs, as well as the necessary changes to the software and the cost of such deployments. The results provide important insights on current FPGA…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
