CoDesign in Action: Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer (DISL)
Thank you for joining this Research Days event! Below you will find the recording and slide for the event, as a well as a 38-minute shortened demo.
The benefits of programmable hardware—speed, performance, resource conservation— have long been reserved for vendor- and deployment-specific systems that require highly specialized expertise. What if the transformative possibilities of specialized hardware were openly available in a vendor-agnostic, portable, and developer-friendly way? What if you could dynamically update your hardware wirelessly as your needs change? Red Hat research engineers and edge computing specialists Ahmed Sanaullah and Jason Schlessman will demonstrate an open source abstraction layer that can help realize this goal. Ben Cushing, Chief Architect, Health & Life Sciences, Red Hat, will lead the conversation.
Watch the Research Day Recording
Research Day slides
Watch the 38 minute demo
Abstract
Open programmable hardware offers tremendous opportunities for increased innovation, lower cost, greater flexibility, and customization in systems we can now build at the cloud’s far edge. However, programming hardware such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays has been extremely difficult and time-consuming due to proprietary tooling and inefficient development flows. This discussion introduces the Dynamic Infrastructure Service Layer (DISL) project, an open source abstraction layer that enables a practical and productive approach to co-designing custom FPGA systems.
For software developers, DISL provides an interface where the entire hardware stack can be fully expressed and customized using only configuration files. It also provides a library of tools needed to manage FPGA deployments for both wired and wireless configurations. For hardware developers, DISL provides a mechanism for packaging IP blocks in a manner that makes these IP blocks portable across FPGA boards, as well as more conducive to customizations and modifications. Finally, the DISL system builder combines the system configuration (generated by domain-specific software) with hardware building blocks (from the DISL component library) to produce custom far-edge systems. The talk will demonstrate how this research, based on work at Boston University and Red Hat, supports quick builds of edge systems using a smart wireless video doorbell example.
For more information on CoDes and DISL, visit the CoDes : A co-design research lab to advance specialized hardware projects project page.
For more information on how instruction set architecture such as RISC-V influences DISL, see this article.
Speakers
Ahmed Sanaullah, Research Scientist, Red Hat
Jason Schlessman, Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat
Conversation Leaders
Ben Cushing, Chief Architect, Health & Life Sciences, Red Hat