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Virtualizing Reconfigurable Hardware to Provide Scalability in Cloud Architectures

Authors:
Oliver Knodel
Paul R. Genssler
Rainer G. Spallek

Keywords: Computing; Virtualization; Reconfigurable Hardware; Partial Reconfiguration

Abstract:
Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide a promising opportunity to improve performance, security and energy efficiency of computing architectures, which are essential in modern data centers. Especially the background acceleration of complex and computationally intensive tasks is an important field of application. The flexible use of reconfigurable devices within a cloud context requires abstraction from the actual hardware through virtualization to offer these resources to service providers. In this paper, we enhance our related Reconfigurable Common Computing Frame (RC2F) approach, which is inspired by system virtual machines, for the profound virtualization of reconfigurable hardware in cloud services. Using partial recon- figuration, our hardware and software framework virtualizes physical FPGAs to provide multiple independent user designs on a single device. Essential components are the management of the virtual user-defined accelerators (vFPGAs), as well as their migration between physical FPGAs to achieve higher system-wide utilization levels. We create homogenous partitions on top of an inhomogeneous FPGA fabric to offer an abstraction from physical location, size and access to the real hardware. We demonstrate the possibilities and the resource trade-off of our approach in a basic scenario. Moreover, we present future perspectives for the use of FPGAs in cloud-based environments.

Pages: 33 to 38

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2017

Publication date: September 10, 2017

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-426X

ISBN: 978-1-61208-585-2

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from September 10, 2017 to September 14, 2017