Moonwalk: NRE Optimization in ASIC Clouds or, accelerators will use old silicon

Cloud services are becoming increasingly globalized and data-center workloads are expanding exponentially. GPU and FPGA-based clouds have illustrated improvements in power and performance by accelerating compute-intensive workloads. ASIC-based clouds are a promising way to optimize the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a given datacenter computation (e.g. YouTube transcoding) by reducing both energy consumption and marginal computation cost. The feasibility of an ASIC Cloud for a particular application is directly gated by the ability to manage the NonRecurring Engineering (NRE) costs of designing and fabricating the ASIC, so that it is significantly lower (e.g. 2×) than the TCO of the best available alternative. In this paper, we show that technology node selection is a major tool for managing ASIC Cloud NRE, and allows the designer to trade off an accelerator’s excess energy efficiency and cost performance for lower total cost. We explore NRE and cross-technology optimization of ASIC Clouds for four different applications: Bitcoin mining, YouTube-style video transcoding, Litecoin, and Deep Learning. We address these challenges and show large reductions in the NRE, potentially enabling ASIC Clouds to address a wider variety of datacenter workloads. Our results suggest that advanced nodes like 16nm will lead to sub-optimal TCO for many workloads, and that use of older nodes like 65nm can enable a greater diversity of ASIC Clouds.