[the_duke]

I'd be interested in practical use cases that come to your mind (like someone who commented about genomics data processing for a university).

What could YOU use this for professionally?

(I certainly always wanted to play around with an FPGA for fun...)

[ktta]

Machine Learning, most likely. See this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13074021

[scott_wilson46]

Monte Carlo sims for options pricing? I've done this before on FPGA, might have a go at doing it for this instance as a fun exercise to test the concept!

[dx034]

Not sure if that makes sense with the offer that Amazon has. The machines are huge, so either you're pricing a huge amount of options at a very high speed (which you'd probably do in-house with FPGAs that you own), or you'll be much cheaper using a good machine locally. Never found MC sims to be a bottleneck regarding time, but YMMV I guess?

[scott_wilson46]

I've heard (although admittedly never seen in practice) that some places take a long time for this sort of things (running over a cluster of computers overnight). If you could do the same job on a single F1 instance in say an hour then I think that would be compelling! Bearing in mind that simple experiments I did showed an improvement of around 100x for this sort of task over a GPU.