Quantifying and mitigating the costs of FPGA virtualization
Sadegh Yazdanshenas, Vaughn Betz · 2017
FPGAs are being incorporated into contemporary datacenters in order to improve computational capacity, power consumption, and processing latency. Efficiently integrating FP-GAs in datacenters is, however, quite challenging. Ideally, smaller tasks could share a device and the cloud management layer would be able to partially reconfigure the device to allocate its free resources to incoming tasks. Moreover, to facilitate FPGA hardware upgrades without undue porting effort for previously developed accelerator tasks, the complexities associated with board-specific system-level integration should be abstracted away from designers. By meeting these requirements, FPGAs in the cloud would become multi-user virtualized resources with increased availability and elasticity. The virtualization of FPGAs, however, comes with two major costs in current FPGAs: lower application operating frequency, and extravagant use of routing resources. In this paper, we quantify the costs of FPGA virtualization and demonstrate that for an FPGA that supports four independent tasks, virtualization reduces the task average frequency by 18% to 46% and increases wire usage to 2.6×. We also investigate the cause of these costs and show that the use of hard NoCs in future datacenter-optimized FPGAs would facilitate FPGA virtualization without sacrificing operating frequency or routing resources.