A survey on big data processing infrastructure: evolving role of FPGA

Abstract

In today’s commercial world, information is becoming a major economic resource thus leading to a statement - Information is wealth. It is a technical challenge for computer systems in managing and analyzing the large volumes of data coming from a variety of resources continuously over a period. Experts are in a mood of moving towards alternative hardware platforms for achieving high-speed data processing and analysis especially for streaming applications.

In this paper, (a) existing trends in big data processing and the necessary systems involved are studied by performing a survey on available platforms, (b) recommended features and suitable hardware systems are proposed based on the operations involved in the processing. Investigation shows that, in combination with CPU and along with GPU, FPGA is a possible alternative. It can be a part of the heterogeneous platform featuring parallelism, pipelining and high performance for the operations involved in big data processing.