System Architecture for Network-Attached FPGAs in the Cloud using Partial Reconfiguration

How to configure and manage zillions of Cloud FPGAs?

Find out in my recent paper about System Architecture for Network-Attached FPGAs in the Cloud using Partial Reconfiguration (DOI: 10.1109/fpl.2019.00054). Published in the Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL).

Abstract

Emerging applications such as deep neural networks, bioinformatics or video encoding impose a high computing pressure on the Cloud. Reconfigurable technologies like Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) can handle such compute-intensive workloads in an efficient and performant way. To seamlessly incorporate FPGAs into existing Cloud environments and leverage their full power efficiency, FPGAs should be directly attached to the data center network and perate independent of power-hungry CPUs. This raises new questions about resource management, application deployment and network integrity. We present a system architecture for managing a large number of network-attached FPGAs in an efficient, flexible and scalable way. To ensure the integrity of the infrastructure, we use partial reconfiguration to separate the non-privileged user logic from the privileged system logic. To create a really scalable and agile cloud service, the management of all resources builds on the Representational State Transfer (REST) concept.

Paper

You can find the PDF here.

Poster

You can find the corresponding poster here.