Pharos: a Performance Monitor for Multi-FPGA Systems
Arzhang Rafii, Paul Chow, Welson Sun · 2021
Field-Programmable Gate Arrays have been increasingly deployed in datacenters and cloud computing infrastructure over the recent years. The most famous example, is perhaps the Microsoft Catapult project [1] , which describes a reconfigurable fabric used to accelerate the Bing web search engine. One important point highlighted by the Catapult paper is the need for performance monitoring tools that provide visibility into the state of multi-FPGA systems. Such tools are not only useful in functional debugging, but can also prove to be valuable in identifying the performance bottlenecks of the hardware.