Architecture Support for FPGA Multi-tenancy in the Cloud

Abstract

Cloud deployments now increasingly provision FPGA accelerators as part of virtual instances. While FPGAs are still essentially single-tenant, the growing demand for hardware acceleration will inevitably lead to the need for methods and architectures supporting FPGA multi-tenancy. In this paper, we propose an architecture supporting space-sharing of FPGA devices among multiple tenants in the cloud. The proposed architecture implements a network-on-chip (NoC) designed for fast data movement and low hardware footprint. Prototyping the proposed architecture on a Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale + demonstrated near specification maximum frequency for on-chip data movement and high throughput in virtual instance access to hardware accelerators. We demonstrate similar performance compared to single-tenant deployment while increasing FPGA utilization (we achieved $6 \times$ higher FPGA utilization with our case study), which is one of the major goals of virtualization. Overall, our NoC interconnect achieved about $2 \times$ higher maximum frequency than the state-of-the-art and a bandwidth of 25.6 Gbps.