Computing Framework for Dynamic Integration of Reconfigurable Resources in a Cloud

Integrating FPGAs into clouds or data centers allows easy access to such reconfigurable resources and provides a promising opportunity to improve both performance and energy efficiency of such systems. Although currently the use of FPGAs as hardware accelerators and especially in clouds is mainly a topic of research, the integration of reconfigurable virtualized resources will become a task of growing importance in the future. We developed a cloud management and hypervisor system called RC3E providing FPGA resources as a service. This paper introduces a computing framework which extends our hypervisor and allows multiple (virtual) user designs on a single physical FPGA. The communication between host and FPGA is implemented by a communication API on the host and the integration of high-level synthesis (HLS) to accelerate applications. We demonstrate the usability of our framework by implementing a sample user design on an FPGA and measuring the performance with up to four simultaneous virtual user designs.