FPGA as a Service: 利用FPGA之動態應用程式加速之方法探討

Abstract

FPGA技術能讓應用程式設計者將複雜的軟體函式投射成自訂的硬體模組，且不同模組各自獨立平行執行，達到極高的效能加速與能源節省；以及能夠反覆重組以適應不同的工作需求，如此的結構同時擁有硬體的速度以及軟體的彈性。 隨著近年FPGA技術不斷進步，在高等計算領域如醫療、軍事、通訊、學術研究等等逐漸受到廣泛使用，但它同時有著設計不易、缺乏統一軟體介面等缺點，以致在一般應用中尚未普及。 在這篇論文中，我們希望引入flow-based programming的概念，以結合實驗室之前的雲端轉移服務，讓開發者在此平台上可以使用FPGA開發程式，以及動態轉移到雲端上的FPGA資源。

FPGA technology allows system developers to convert software functions into circuits that provide higher performance and lower energy consumption than executing the functions on the CPU. Furthermore, FPGA chips can be reconfigured for handling different workloads. Thus, FPGA has the performance advantage of hardware circuits and the flexibility of software programming. Recently, FPGA has a growing popularity in specialized areas such as medication, military, telecom, academic research, etc. However, FPGA also has disadvantages such as the degree of difficulty in design, lack of standard application interfaces, hence the FPGA is still not widely used for applications on general-purpose computer system. In the thesis, with a flow-based programming paradigm, we develop a dynamic migration framework for application developers to use FPGA to offload tasks. With this new framework, developers can accelerate applications dynamically with FPGA on the same system or on the Cloud.