Microsoft is planning to use programmable chips to boost the performance of the servers for its Bing search engine, by accelerating certain services using these devices. The project, called Catapult, used field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, which as the name suggests can be configured by customers on the field after they are manufactured. FPGAs are now seen as powerful computing devices in their own right, which can be used for accelerating certain programmable tasks, researchers working on the project said. The new approach is likely to be important for compute-intensive services like Bing as Microsoft can now selectively speed up large-scale services, such as its ranking throughput, by adding FPGA compute boards to servers, rather than buy more hardware and CPUs to run the workloads.
