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Ask HN: Anyone using cloud based FPGA for non-ML tasks?

10 points by tonmoy ↗ HN
As an engineer working in ASIC universe it is difficult to do side projects and learn digital design or RTL without spending thousands of dollars on hardware. Cloud based FPGA services like aws-FPGA seem approachable, but I’m wondering if these services actually have any good use cases in real life. I don’t want to work on a side project like making an HDMI controller or something if it has no real world value

9 comments

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aranchelk
In the past Swarm64 was using FPGAs to accelerate Postgres queries, per a post on their blog they made FPGA hardware optional due to requests from users:

https://swarm64.com/post/announcing-swarm64-v4/

tonmoy
I had heard of accelerating DB using FPGA, before but never looked into it. Swarm64 looks impressive. Thanks!
ecesena
We're working on multi scalar multiplication (MSM) as part of this prize, that will be evaluated on AWS F1. See link to "prize specification" for details (pdf). https://www.zprize.io/prizes/accelerating-msm-operations-on-...
tonmoy
That seems pretty cool! In the past doing arithmetic seemed less efficient in custom RTL compared to GPU, but maybe I was wrong.
ecesena
No idea tbh. I haven’t seen any reliable numbers in literature and N=2^26 is pretty big/unheard of. I guess we’ll see results in a few months.
daniel-cussen
Dude nothing has real world value until you breathe all your breath of life into it, making it alive. Gotta be smart though, gotta make what people want.

Hey I need an HDMI controller, I want to use it to...break bandwidth barriers, I'll elaborate more when I deem proper. It's just video has the highest commonly-used bandwidth, it's the common language of high-bandwidth.

And hey I'm looking for FPGA/ASIC engineers! Starting this new thing, fgemm.com (not yet launched, demo on https://skylinesort.com). Email in profile. I mean, if you actually wanted to do an HDMI controller. Real-world value, I'll tell you more. 93% margins on hardware. If I can get HDMI to work.

It's a hack. You'll see. But you really will see it, it really will be visible through HDMI.

davidcox143
We are! Integrated Reasoning is working on a series of FPGA cores to accelerate NP-complete problems.

We're shipping a knapsack solver and a subset sum solver to the AWS Marketplace at the end of this month!

https://integrated-reasoning.com https://ir.design/kpu

tonmoy
Wow that sounds awesome. Do you use FPGA to get the work done quicker or is it because it is more efficient in terms of computation/cost?
davidcox143
Thanks! We're working on both -- faster computation at lower cost than what's possible on x86 or GPUs.

If you're interested in access to our beta projects, send us an email at beta@integrated-reasoning.com and we'll set you up :)