The goal of Vineyard was to develop energy-efficient, accelerator-based servers and technology for enabling the efficient, seamless integration of hardware acceleration in the data center. The deployment of energy-efficient hardware accelerators was used to improve significantly the performance of Cloud-computing applications and reduce the energy consumption in data centers.
In the years that passed since project start, the VINEYARD vision has seen its realization as the deployment of hardware accelerators in the Cloud: in 2017, hyperscalers like Amazon, Huawei, Alibaba and Baidu offered FPGA resources to their Cloud users.
VINEYARD developed novel energy-efficient platforms by integrating two types of hardware accelerator: A new-generation dataflow-based accelerator and a novel architecture for FPGA-based (control-flow) accelerators. The dataflow engines (DFEs) are suitable for high-performance computing (HPC) applications that can be effectively represented with dataflow graphs while the latter are used for accelerating applications that need tight communication between the processor and the hardware accelerator(s).
