
Thin Servers with Smart Pipes: Designing SoC Accelerators for Memcached (2013) - luu
https://research.facebook.com/publications/506574832765691/thin-servers-with-smart-pipes-designing-soc-accelerators-for-memcached/
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woodhull
This sort of cloud scale thinking about power usage/performance is how we'll
clean up the environmental record of the data center industry.

Think about how this sort of thing when applied to AWS ElastiCache would
reduce the coal fueled electricity footprint of the thousands of startups that
use that service.

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name_censored_
It reduces energy usage, but also the useful lifespan of servers. Commodity
servers can be pushed into different (lesser) roles when they get older, but
specialty kit cannot. More specialty kit means more e-waste, and more e-waste
means more toxic metals in the soil.

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cordite
FPGAs in a networked kit like this could still be repurposed in some way,
yeah? Perhaps not as broadly as the typical server.

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name_censored_
I'd be astonished if they use FPGAs in production kit. Once they get the
circuit design right, even a modest quantity of (static) ASICs would be
cheaper than FPGAs, and probably faster.

That said, if this really takes off, I'm sure some enterprising spirit will
write some software to re-purpose these things as-is (I'm thinking something
like a VMWare driver to turn them into NVRAM-SANs for disposable "worker" VMs)

