Baidu Takes FPGA Approach to Accelerating SQL at Scale

While much of the work at Baidu we have focused on this year has centered on the Chinese search giant's deep learning initiatives, many other critical, albeit less bleeding edge applications present true big data challenges. As Baidu's Jian Ouyang detailed this week at the Hot Chips conference, Baidu sits on over an exabyte of data, processes around 100 petabytes per day, updates 10 billion webpages daily, and handles over a petabyte of log updates every 24 hours. These numbers are on par with Google and as one might imagine, it takes a Google-like approach to problem solving at scale to get around potential bottlenecks. Just as we have described Google looking for any way possible to beat Moore's Law, Baidu is on the same quest. While the exciting, sexy machine learning work is fascinating, acceleration of the core mission-critical elements of the business is as well--because it has to be.