The Future of FPGA Acceleration in Datacenters and the Cloud
In this article, we survey existing academic and commercial efforts to provide Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) acceleration in datacenters and the cloud. The goal is a critical review of existing systems and a discussion of their evolution from single workstations with PCI-attached FPGAs in the early days of reconfigurable computing to the integration of FPGA farms in large-scale computing infrastructures. From the lessons learned, we discuss the future of FPGAs in datacenters and the cloud and assess the challenges likely to be encountered along the way. The article explores current architectures and discusses scalability and abstractions supported by operating systems, middleware, and virtualization. Hardware and software security becomes critical when infrastructure is shared among tenants with disparate backgrounds. We review the vulnerabilities of current systems and possible attack scenarios and discuss mitigation strategies, some of which impact FPGA architecture and technology. The viability of these architectures for popular applications is reviewed, with a particular focus on deep learning and scientific computing. This work draws from workshop discussions, panel sessions including the participation of experts in the reconfigurable computing field, and private discussions among these experts. These interactions have harmonized the terminology, taxonomy, and the important topics covered in this manuscript.
Authors
CHRISTOPHE BOBDA and JOEL MANDEBI MBONGUE, University of Florida
PAUL CHOW, MOHAMMAD EWAIS, NAIF TARAFDAR, and JUAN CAMILO VEGA, University of Toronto
KEN EGURO, Microsoft
DIRK KOCH, Manchester University
SURANGA HANDAGALA and MIRIAM LEESER, Northeastern University
MARTIN HERBORDT and HAFSAH SHAHZAD, Boston University
PETER HOFSTE, IBM POWER Systems Performance
BURKHARD RINGLEIN, IBM Research Europe
JAKUB SZEFER, Yale University
AHMED SANAULLAH, Red Hat, Inc
RUSSELL TESSIER, University of Massachusetts Amherst