Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 11, numbers 3 and 4, 2018 // View article

FPGAs and the Cloud -- An Endless Tale of Virtualization, Elasticity and Efficiency

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

Keywords: Cloud 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 present our Reconfigurable Common Computing Frame (RC2F) approach - inspired by system virtual machines - for the profound virtualization of reconfigurable hardware in cloud services. Using partial reconfiguration, our framework abstracts a single physical FPGA into multiple independent virtual FPGAs (vFPGAs). A user can request vFPGAs of different size for optimal resource utilization and energy efficiency of the whole cloud system. To enable such flexibility, we create homogeneous partitions on top of an inhomogeneous FPGA fabric abstracting from physical locations and static areas. The RC2FSec extension combines this virtualization with a security system to allow for processing of sensitive data. On the host side our Reconfigurable Common Cloud Computing Environment (RC3E) offers different service models and manages the allocation of the dynamic vFPGAs. 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: 230 to 249

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2018. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 30, 2018

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x