A Study of FPGA Virtualization and Accelerator Scheduling

Abstract

Deploying field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) on the cloud to accelerate the processing of the explosively growing server workloads is becoming a clear trend today. However, the costs reduction of accelerator design and deployment is still difficult with conventional development methods and tools. In the previous work, we proposed the hCODE platform to simplify the design, share and deployment of FPGA accelerators, which adopted a shell-and-IP design pattern and developed supporting tools to improve the reusability and the portability of accelerator designs. In this paper, based on our previous work, we propose new design methods and tools for FPGA virtualization and scheduling that allowing IPs to be implemented at cluster scale in low cost. With the proposed platform, users can easily deploy multiple accelerators on one FPGA to improve on-chip resources and communication bandwidth utilization.