Microsoft has been using #fpga in #smartnics in their data centers for many years as part of projects Catapult and Brainwave.
I don't know enough about fpgas to know what I can do with them, but the price on the used market is too tempting to pass these up.
Here's a good write up about the boards and making use of them.
I also wanted to point out the author's brilliant solution to the lack of GPIO pins on this smartnic. He wired a QSFP module and programmed the board to provide UART from the I2C pins.
Attached: 1 image Challenge: no IO for basic UART. But we do have unused QSFP ports. With I2C for the eeprom... let's hack this SFP first. #fpga
@lymenzies There are plenty of FPGA boards out there to reverse engineer, but an additional constraint is finding those that don’t require a commercial Vivado or Quartus license.
The current favorite is the Alibaba Accelerator Card:
I bought one but haven’t played with it.
Thanks for this. I’ll add it to my watch list.
lymenzies
Tom Verbeure