Title
ASIC clouds: specializing the datacenter for planet-scale applications
Abstract
Planet-scale applications are driving the exponential growth of the Cloud, and datacenter specialization is the key enabler of this trend. GPU- and FPGA-based clouds have already been deployed to accelerate compute-intensive workloads. ASIC-based clouds are a natural evolution as cloud services expand across the planet. ASIC Clouds are purpose-built datacenters comprised of large arrays of ASIC accelerators that optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of large, high-volume scale-out computations. On the surface, ASIC Clouds may seem improbable due to high NREs and ASIC inflexibility, but large-scale ASIC Clouds have already been deployed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system. This paper distills lessons from these Bitcoin ASIC Clouds and applies them to other large scale workloads such as YouTube-style video-transcoding and Deep Learning, showing superior TCO versus CPU and GPU. It derives Pareto-optimal ASIC Cloud servers based on accelerator properties, by jointly optimizing ASIC architecture, DRAM, motherboard, power delivery, cooling, and operating voltage. Finally, the authors examine the impact of ASIC NRE and when it makes sense to build an ASIC Cloud.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1145/3399734
Communications of the ACM
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
63
7
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0001-0782
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Michael Bedford Taylor11707154.51
Luis Vega2182.52
Moein Khazraee300.34
Ikuo Magaki400.34
Scott Davidson5143.05
Dustin Richmond6244.77