Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

The cloud computing paradigm provides users with access over the Internet to large clusters of computingx000D
nodes . Cloud computing offers several advantages: Primarily, users benefit by only paying for the computingx000D
time that they need without having to purchase their own equipment. In addition, cloud computing clusters arex000D
organized to make it easy for users to scale up their programs to exploit a large number of computing nodesx000D
that operate in parallel and thus speed up computationally demanding calculations. Finally, cloud computingx000D
allows users to bid for computer access at less busy times and benefit from lower fees. In recent years thex000D
capabilities of computing nodes have increased from the inclusion of multiple general-purpose centralx000D
processing units (CPUs). Also, specialized parallel computers with many simple CPUs, called graphicsx000D
processing units (GPUs) and which were developed originally to accelerate visual effects, have been used tox000D
speed up more general calculations whose parallel structure matches that of the GPU. Cloud computing nodesx000D
have already adopted those advances. More recently, cloud computing nodes have become available whosex000D
performance is further enhanced by software re-configurable chips, called field-programmable gate arraysx000D
(FPGAs). FPGAs provide an implementation technology that is intermediate in performance and cost betweenx000D
general-purpose software-programmable CPUs (and GPUs) and full-custom chips that only perform specificx000D
calculations very fast. FPGAs have been widely used as platforms for building hardware accelerators where nox000D
suitable full-custom chip is available. However, it is only recently that FGPAs have been provided in cloudx000D
computing nodes. This project is a collaboration between the principal investigator (PI) and the sponsoringx000D
company to investigate a series of promising applications of FPGA-enhanced cloud computing nodes forx000D
problems that build upon the PI's expertise and that are likely to open up new business opportunities for thex000D
company. The proposed Engage grant funded project would allow Eideticom to benefit from the expertise andx000D
engineering time of the PI as well as his graduate students at the University of Alberta.