Title
Engaging Heterogeneous FPGAs in the Cloud.
Abstract
FPGA has become an essential infrastructural component in commercial cloud and datacenter for improving system performance and efficiency. Meanwhile, a heterogeneous FPGA chip (Hetero-FPGA) in which a multi-core System-on-Chip (SoC) is tightly integrated with an FPGA fabric has been successfully pioneered. Given its hardware-software co-programmability, Hetero-FPGA is supposed to become an independent and first-class cloud computing resource with networking capabilities in order to avoid involving brawny commodity x86 servers as carriers for FPGA fabrics which are usually the cases in current commercial FPGA clouds from several web vendors. Following this design paradigm, we present HeFA, a self-contained Hetero-FPGA Array architecture in cloud. We construct a high-level hardware template as well as a software stack for the Hetero-FPGA node, enabling the SoC as a primary engine to manage, coordinate and incorporate with the dominant FPGA fabric. We also propose a fully scripted design flow to make HeFA as an easy-to-use cloud infrastructure. Based on these techniques, we implement an academia prototype chassis of HeFA that includes 32 Hetero-FPGA nodes with Xilinx's Zynq MPSoC chips. By a customized cloud resource manager, the prototype is flexibly provisioned as either 32 individual FPGA nodes or multiple scalable sub-clusters to abstract arbitrary volume of reconfigurable fabrics as on-demand cloud services. In this manner, a versatile research and educational platform is delivered for agile hardware-software co-design in scenarios such as domain-specific accelerator development, open instruction set architecture-based chip design, computer system-related experimental project, and so on.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3289602.3294001
FPGA
Field
DocType
ISBN
Computer science,Instruction set,Server,Field-programmable gate array,Provisioning,Real-time computing,Design flow,MPSoC,Cloud computing,Scalability,Embedded system
Conference
978-1-4503-6137-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ke Zhang17521.74
Yisong Chang253.92
Ming-yu Chen390279.29
Yungang Bao436131.11
Zhiwei Xu51563162.88