Fabio Maschi gives an invited talk at Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA

Fabio Maschi gave a talk on "Leveraging Accelerators for Efficient Cloud Computing: A Holistic Approach" at Microsoft in Washington, USA

Abstract
This talk addresses the growing imbalance between modern hardware and conventional CPUs in distributed systems, emphasising the need for holistic approaches. First, we present a detailed study of a powerful FPGA-based acceleration within a commercial flight search engine. We explore multiple configurations between the upstream system and the accelerator setup, shedding light to the impractical constraints that the current interconnect imposes to the overall system deployment. Second, we introduce Strega, a lightweight HTTP server enabling FPGA-accelerated functions through a RESTful protocol. Our findings inform the development of efficient disaggregated accelerators and pave the way for FPGA microservices in distributed cloud applications, bypassing CPU overhead and unlocking the full potential of heterogeneous computing.