Specializing a Planet's Computation: ASIC Clouds

GPU- and FPGA-based clouds have been deployed to accelerate computationally intensive workloads. ASIC-based clouds are a natural evolution as cloud services expand across the planet. ASIC Clouds are purpose-built datacenters comprising large arrays of ASIC accelerators that optimize the total cost of ownership (TCO) of large, high-volume scale-out computations. On the surface, ASIC Clouds may seem improbable due to high nonrecurring engineering (NRE) costs and ASIC inflexibility, but large-scale ASIC Clouds have been deployed for the Bitcoin cryptocurrency system. This article distills lessons from these Bitcoin ASIC Clouds and applies them to other large-scale workloads, including YouTube-style video-transcoding and Deep Learning, showing superior TCO versus CPU and GPU. It derives Pareto-optimal ASIC Cloud servers based on accelerator properties, by jointly optimizing ASIC architecture, DRAM, motherboard, power delivery, cooling, and operating voltage. Finally, the authors examine the impact of ASIC NRE and when it makes sense to build an ASIC Cloud.