DISL: A Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer for Reconfigurable Hardware
As modern data center workloads become increasingly complex, constrained and critical, mainstream “CPU-centric” computing can no longer keep pace. Future data centers are moving towards a more fluid model, with computation and communication no longer localized to commodity computers and communication devices. Next generation “data-centric” data centers will “compute everywhere,” whether data is stationary (in memory) or on the move (in network). Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), is transforming ordinary clouds into massive supercomputers. Currently, however, there are high costs and overheads associated with productivity in reconfigurable hardware ecosystems. These are predominantly vendor and deployment specific, which leads to limited portability. To enable developers to effectively leverage reconfigurable hardware we propose a Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer, or DISL for short. DISL taps into the tried and tested abstractions used in software systems and will enable substantially higher productivity through reduced developer effort, well-defined developer roles, standard interfaces, and greater code compatibility across products and vendors.
Invited Talks
- FPGAs Everywhere in Large-Scale Computer SystemsInternational Supercomputing Conference; Hamburg, Germany; May 31, 2022.
Project Team
Principal Investigator: Martin Herbordt
Red Hat Collaborators: Uli Drepper and Ahmed Sanaullah
PhD Students: Sahan Bandara
Undergraduate students: Basil Ng
Project Poster
