Towards Hardware Support for FPGA Resource Elasticity
Ahsan Javed Awan, Fidan Aliyeva · 2022 25th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design (DSD) · 2022
FPGAs are increasingly being deployed in the cloud to accelerate diverse applications. They are to be shared among multiple tenants to improve the total cost of ownership. Partial reconfiguration technology enables multitenancy on FPGA by partitioning it into regions, each hosting a specific application's accelerator. However, the region's size can not be changed once they are defined, resulting in the underutilization of FPGA resources. This paper argues to divide the acceleration requirements of an application into multiple small computation modules. The devised FPGA shell can reconfigure the available PR regions with those modules and enable them to communicate with each other over Crossbar interconnect with the Wishbone bus interface. The implemented crossbar's reconfiguration ability allows to modify the number of allocated modules and allocated bandwidth to those modules while preventing any invalid communication request. The envisioned resource manager can increase or decrease the number of PR regions allocated to an application based on its acceleration requirements and PR regions' availability.