Have you heard of Microsoft's distributed FPGA fabric project? They are using acceleration for a lot of Bing's algorithms with excellent result all around. They are now working on bringing it to Azure.
That's Catapult, right? I have read through some of their papers. It sounds like they might be offloading some network work onto the FPGAs in the same way AWS has their custom nitro card, but I've not really been impressed with their attempts at data processing improvements (some reason for me to use it on Azure). I haven't read all of their papers, but what I have read always sounded like an after the fact justification for the FPGAs. They might show the FPGAs are better at a machine learning task than CPUs, but unless you were deciding whether to use FPGAs you already have, the real competition is GPUs and they tended not to compare to a GPU.
Do you have a recommendation for a specific data processing experiment of theirs I should check out? I really feel like I just missed a paper where they proved some real advantage over other hardware, and once I found that I'd understand. I respect the Azure teams generally and assume they know what they're doing- but can't escape the hunch that what they are doing is network acceleration, and are just releasing to the public cloud because they have these sitting around anyway.
Do you have a recommendation for a specific data processing experiment of theirs I should check out? I really feel like I just missed a paper where they proved some real advantage over other hardware, and once I found that I'd understand. I respect the Azure teams generally and assume they know what they're doing- but can't escape the hunch that what they are doing is network acceleration, and are just releasing to the public cloud because they have these sitting around anyway.