IO and data management for infrastructure as a service FPGA accelerators

We describe the design of a non-operating-system based embedded system to automate the management, reordering, and movement of data produced by FPGA accelerators within data centre environments. In upcoming cloud computing environments, where FPGA acceleration may be leveraged via Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), end users will no longer have full access to the underlying hardware resources. We envision a partially reconfigurable FPGA region that end-users can access for their custom acceleration needs, and a static “template” region offered by the data centre to manage all Input/Output (IO) data requirements to the FPGA. Thus our low-level software controlled system allows for standard DDR access to off-chip memory, as well as DMA movement of data to and from SATA based SSDs, and access to Ethernet stream links. Two use cases of FPGA accelerators are presented as experimental examples to demonstrate the area and performance costs of integrating our data-management system alongside such accelerators. Comparisons are also made to fully custom data management solutions implemented solely in RTL Verilog to determine the tradeoffs in using our system in regards to development time, area, and performance. We find that for a class of accelerators in which the physical data rate of an IO channel is the limiting bottleneck to accelerator throughput, our solution offers drastically reduced logic development time spent on data management without any associated performance losses in doing so. However, for a class of applications where the IO channel is not the bottle-neck, our solution trades off increased area usage to save on design times and to maintain acceptable system throughput in the face of degraded IO throughput.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofReviewedFacult