Book excerpt: This book provides readers with an overview of the architectures, programming frameworks, and hardware accelerators for typical cloud computing applications in data centers. The authors present the most recent and promising solutions, using hardware accelerators to provide high throughput, reduced latency and higher energy efficiency compared to current servers based on commodity processors. Readers will benefit from state-of-the-art information regarding application requirements in contemporary data centers, computational complexity of typical tasks in cloud computing, and a programming framework for the efficient utilization of the hardware accelerators.