A survey on reconfigurable accelerators for cloud computing

Data centers are experiencing an exponential increase in the amount of network traffic that they have to sustain due to cloud computing and several emerging web applications. To face this network load, large data centers are required with thousands of servers interconnected with high bandwidth switches. Current data center, based on general purpose processor, consume excessive power while their utilization is quite low. Hardware accelerators can provide high energy efficiency for many cloud applications but they lack the programming efficiency of processors. In the last few years, there several efforts for the efficient deployment of hardware accelerators in the data centers. This paper presents a thorough survey of the frameworks for the efficient utilization of the FPGAs in the data centers. Furthermore it presents the hardware accelerators that have been implemented for the most widely used cloud computing applications. Furthermore, the paper provides a qualitative categorization and comparison of the proposed schemes based on their main features such as speedup and energy efficiency.