High performance interconnects are critical for supercomputers, data centers, and other distributed computing systems, directly influencing the performance and scalability of parallel applications. This paper introduces the Alpha interconnect, a cost-effective, high performance solution based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The use of modern inexpensive FPGAs enables implementation of both the communication network functionality and application-level acceleration features. This approach makes it possible to produce network hardware at an affordable price, significantly reduce the development cost compared to developing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and achieve flexibility to integrate with various software and hardware solutions. This paper describes the Alpha interconnect architecture, hardware implementation details, software stack, and performance evaluation results.