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Virtualized execution runtime for FPGA accelerators in the cloud
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Asiatici, Mikhail, George, Nithin, Vipin, Kizheppatt, Fahmy, Suhaib A. and Ienne, Paolo (2017) Virtualized execution runtime for FPGA accelerators in the cloud. IEEE Access, 5 . pp. 1900-1910. doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2661582 ISSN 2169-3536.
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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2661582
Abstract
FPGAs offer high performance coupled with energy efficiency, making them extremely attractive computational resources within a cloud ecosystem. However, to achieve this integration and make them easy to program, we first need to enable users with varying expertise to easily develop cloud applications that leverage FPGAs. With the growing size of FPGAs, allocating them monolithically to users can be wasteful due to potentially low device utilization. Hence, we also need to be able to dynamically share FPGAs among multiple users. To address these concerns, we propose a methodology and a runtime system that together simplify the FPGA application development process by providing: 1) a clean abstraction with high-level APIs for easy application development; 2) a simple execution model that supports both hardware and software execution; and 3) a shared memory-model which is convenient to use for the programmers. Akin to an operating system on a computer, our lightweight runtime system enables the simultaneous execution of multiple applications by virtualizing computational resources, i.e., FPGA resources and on-board memory, and offers protection facilities to isolate applications from each other. In this paper, we illustrate how these features can be developed in a lightweight manner and quantitatively evaluate the performance overhead they introduce on a small set of applications running on our proof of concept prototype. Our results demonstrate that these features only introduce marginal performance overheads. More importantly, by sharing resources for simultaneous execution of multiple user applications, our platform improves FPGA utilization and delivers higher aggregate throughput compared to accessing the device in a time-shared manner.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Electronic computers. Computer science. Computer software T Technology > TK Electrical engineering. Electronics Nuclear engineering |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Engineering > Engineering | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Field programmable gate arrays, Cloud computing | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | IEEE Access | ||||||
Publisher: | IEEE | ||||||
ISSN: | 2169-3536 | ||||||
Official Date: | 2 February 2017 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 5 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 1900-1910 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1109/ACCESS.2017.2661582 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 16 March 2017 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 17 March 2017 | ||||||
Open Access Version: |
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