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Modular FPGA Systems with Support for Dynamic Workloads and Virtualisation

Vaishnav, Anuj Ashokbhai

[Thesis]. Manchester, UK: The University of Manchester; 2020.

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Abstract

This thesis shows that it is feasible to build modular FPGA systems which can dynamically change the hardware resources in the spatial and the temporal domains using existing tools and accelerators, to improve maintainability, adaptability, and accessibility for FPGA systems. To achieve this, first, a modular FPGA development flow is proposed to build an FPGA operating system, spanning both software and hardware level, where each component can be changed, reused, or ported to other systems with minor changes and recompilation steps. This modular flow removes the dependencies in existing infrastructures while supporting a wide range of FPGA use cases (static acceleration to dynamic multi-tenant acceleration) with easy-to-use software interfaces for both software and hardware developers. This platform is then extended using OpenCL to perform scheduling across two types of computing devices available on modern FPGA systems, i.e. both CPU and FPGA. To improve the adaptability of the system while maximising system utilisation, a novel concept called `resource elasticity' is proposed to allow the system to change the amount of resources used by a task transparently from the user in both space and time domain. Further, this is combined with the ability to dynamically move computation between CPU and FPGA (as well as collaborative execution) to allow changing the 1) device type (CPU or FPGA or both), 2) accelerator type, 3) number of compute units and 4) workload partitioning while supporting multi-tasking. Finally, this platform is used with multiple nodes to show how we can perform live migration across different FPGA nodes to allow system maintenance, load balancing and fault tolerance at the cluster level. Overall, with these contributions, this thesis enables building scalable FPGA systems that can support environments with dynamic workloads (e.g. cloud and edge computing) without compromising on the programmability, performance and ease of use for FPGAs. Further, the proposed solutions also improve the productivity for general FPGA users through a modular development flow and high-level user interfaces.