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

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 analysing 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.