Computer Clouds are growing in size and customer base. Lately their growth has been limited or at least influenced by hosted server’s power consumption.
FPGA is a good contender for providing task offloading to CPU based servers. However hard coded FPGA solutions are not flexible enough to support a variety of applications being used in Clouds. FPGA soft processors provide the required flexibility but not the speed. High Level Synthesis requires FPGA reconfiguration.
The solution to enabling use of FPGAs in Clouds seems to be logical: use a fundamentally simple and small processor
(flexibility) that runs code that is as close to hardware fixed function architecture as possible (speed).
The above set of requirements has led to the creation of hardware architectures that improve the existing state-of-the-art with features applicable to the Cloud computing environment.
A real life design inspired by requirements from financial industry is implemented on a FPGA.