{"id":586891,"date":"2019-06-10T06:30:21","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T13:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-project&p=586891"},"modified":"2025-08-13T08:57:59","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T15:57:59","slug":"honeycomb","status":"publish","type":"msr-project","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/honeycomb\/","title":{"rendered":"Honeycomb"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Traditional CPUs are general, but this comes at a cost (called \u201cTuring tax\u201d). They are more expensive and less efficient than specialized hardware. This raises the question: should we build CPU-free nodes? CPU-free nodes only have custom hardware and storage. We envision that in the future distributed systems, like data stores and storage systems, will run on a large collection of CPU-free nodes. The fast path will execute entirely in custom hardware. Only control-plane operations will execute on CPUs. This will result in better performance, higher efficiency, and lower cost. Realizing this vision requires solving many challenges including data structure and hardware co-design, providing sharing and isolation, security and management. These are all different from a traditional system running with the CPU and the OS.<\/p>\n

Project Honeycomb is tackling the challenges of building complex abstractions in custom hardware. We are targeting common abstractions, such as hashtables, B-trees, scans, updates, aggregation, and filtering. These abstractions are used by many systems and they would all benefit from efficient hardware implementations. We are using FPGAs today.<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Traditional CPUs are general, but this comes at a cost (called \u201cTuring tax\u201d). They are more expensive and less efficient than specialized hardware. This raises the question: should we build CPU-free nodes? CPU-free nodes only have custom hardware and storage. We envision that in the future distributed systems, like data stores and storage systems, will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":587260,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"research-area":[13563,13552,13547],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-586891","msr-project","type-msr-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-data-platform-analytics","msr-research-area-hardware-devices","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us","msr-archive-status-complete"],"msr_project_start":"","related-publications":[1147670],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-groups":[],"related-events":[],"related-opportunities":[],"related-posts":[],"related-articles":[],"tab-content":[],"slides":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"user_nicename","display_name":"Junyi Liu","user_id":38532,"people_section":"Section name 1","alias":"junyili"}],"msr_research_lab":[199561],"msr_impact_theme":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/586891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-project"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/586891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1147867,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/586891\/revisions\/1147867"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/587260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=586891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=586891"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=586891"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=586891"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=586891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}