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.

https://www.devops.lol/used-fpga-boards/

Used FPGA boards

This post documents my quest for finding boards with high end FPGA devices and peripherals for reasonable prices. Used SmartNICs I started looking at accelerators and first generation SmartNICs.

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.

https://fosstodon.org/@ruurd/110984837790073703

ruurd (@[email protected])

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

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