Operating a datacenter at web scale requires managing many conflicting requirements. The ability to deliver computation at a high level and speed is a given, but because of the demands such a facility must meet, a datacenter also needs flexibility. Additionally, it must be efficient in its use of power, keeping costs as low as possible. Addressing often conflicting goals is a challenge, leading datacenter providers to seek constant performance and efficiency improvements and to evaluate the merits of general-purpose versus task-tuned alternatives—particularly in an era in which Moore's Law is nearing an end, as some suggest. Microsoft researchers and colleagues from Bing have been collaborating with others from industry and academia to examine datacenter hardware alternatives, and their work, a project known as Catapult, was presented in Minneapolis on June 16 during the 41st International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA). Their paper, titled A Reconfigurable Fabric for Accelerating Large-Scale Datacenter Services, describes an effort to combine programmable hardware and software that usesfield-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to deliver performance improvements of as much as 95 percent. The significance of this work, says Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, could be dramatic. "Going into production with this new technology will be a watershed moment for Bing search," he says. "For the first time ever, the quality of Bing's page ranking will be driven not only by great algorithms but also by hardware—incredibly advanced hardware that can be made more highly specialized than anything ever seen before at datacenter scale." Microsoft researcher Doug Burger, one of 23 co-authors of the ISCA paper, explains the motivation behind this project. For more details : Brand Storytelling Video