Re:Microsoft Bets Its Future on a Reprogrammable Computer Chip
by Scaevolus on Sunday September 25, 2016 @10:00PM
(#12578716)
In Bing, it's used to score results for queries: "One of these FPGA nodes did the Bing search scoring for a 48-node server pod, and was linked to the nodes by four 10 Gb/sec Ethernet ports." http://www.enterprisetech.com/2014/09/03/microsoft-using-fpg...
4.4, Feature Extraction: "The first stage of the scoring acceleration pipeline, Feature
Extraction (FE), calculates numeric scores for a variety of “features”
based on the query and document combination. There
are potentially thousands of unique features calculated for
each document, as each feature calculation produces a result
for every stream in the request—furthermore, some features
produce a result per query term as well. Our FPGA accelerator
offers a significant advantage over software because each of
the feature extraction engines can run in parallel, working on
the same input stream. This is effectively a form of Multiple
Instruction Single Data (MISD) computation."
Here's a paper about it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
4.4, Feature Extraction: "The first stage of the scoring acceleration pipeline, Feature Extraction (FE), calculates numeric scores for a variety of “features” based on the query and document combination. There are potentially thousands of unique features calculated for each document, as each feature calculation produces a result for every stream in the request—furthermore, some features produce a result per query term as well. Our FPGA accelerator offers a significant advantage over software because each of the feature extraction engines can run in parallel, working on the same input stream. This is effectively a form of Multiple Instruction Single Data (MISD) computation."