Microsoft’s Catapult Project To Power A Bing Data Center Next Year [Updated]

After a successful test, Microsoft says it will expand its Catapult server project to all Bing servers in one of its datacenters in 2015. Microsoft told a microprocessor conference Tuesday about the results from its early testing.

The PC World article gets into fairly technical details about the Catapult boards and their use of “field-programmable gate arrays” (FPGAs), but here’s the crux of the test and the speed improvements that affected Bing’s search results:

[blockquote]Microsoft then tucked the cards into a production test: 1,632 servers in a datacenter. What the company found, Putnam said, was that the FPGA cards accelerated Bing’s scoring of documents for relevance compared to a user’s search parameters. Microsoft achieved a 2X improvement in search throughput and a 29-percent reduction in the latency delay to process the search. The savings allowed Microsoft to cut the number of servers it needed in half.[/blockquote]

Google has long focused on (and advertised) the speed of its servers and how quickly results are returned to searchers. It sounds like Microsoft is betting that Catapult will help narrow any gap that may exist in users’ minds between Bing and Google on the issue of getting results back quickly.

When discussing the Catapult project earlier this summer, Microsoft Research chief Peter Lee also said it’ll help with Bing’s relevancy:

[blockquote cite=”Peter Lee, Microsoft”]For the first time ever, the quality of Bing’s page ranking will be driven not only by great algorithms but also by hardware.[/blockquote]

PC World also reports that Baidu, the Chinese search engine, has also been testing the same technology and has seen similar results as Microsoft.

Postscript: The original report was incorrect and our story has been edited to reflect that the Catapult rollout will only happen in one Bing datacenter, not all.