Greener Search with FPGAs
Last year, the Austrian company MatrixWare and the Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) approached Leif Azzopardi and me to create a Proof-of-Concept of an FPGA-based information retrieval system. We built the system on SGI Altix 4700 with two RC-100 FPGA blades using a high-level programming solution from the Swedish company Mitrionics and demonstrated it successfully during the Information Retrieval Facility Symposium. As usual, the academic output lagged somewhat but this summer we had two highly succesful papers, one at SIGIR and one at FPL. There is clearly a huge potential in the use of FPGAs to reduce energy consumption of a wide range of systems and we are actively seeking collaborations to explore the possibilities.
