Grounding high efficiency cloud computing architecture: HW-SW co-design and implementation of a stand-alone web server on FPGA

With the advent of the cloud computing, web servers, as the major channel in cloud computing, need to be redesigned to meet performance and power constraints. Considerable efforts have been invested in distributed web servers and web caching with different optimizing strategies, but few existing studies have been directly focused on improving the web server itself, not to mention complete hardware-favored web services. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of web server and implement it on FPGA. After taking challenge with significant difficulties in design and implementation, we manage to complete an evaluation system which confirms that hardware-favored architecture brings higher throughput, lower power consumption as well as stand-alone web service functionalities due to direct pipelining execution of web service protocols in hardware without operating system.