A System Development Kit for Big Data Applications on FPGA-based Clusters: The EVEREST Approach
Christian Pilato, Subhadeep Banik, Jakub Beránek, Fabien Brocheton, Jerónimo Castrillón, Riccardo Cevasco, Radim Cmar, Serena Curzel, Fabrizio Ferrandi, Karl F. A. Friebel, Antonella Galizia, Matteo Grasso, Paulo Victor Santos Silva, Jan Martinovič, Gianluca Palermo, Michele Paolino, Andrea Parodi, Antonio Parodi, Fabio Pintus, Raphael Polig · 2024
Modern big data workflows are characterized by computationally intensive kernels. The simulated results are often combined with knowledge extracted from AI models to ultimately support decision-making. These energy-hungry workflows are increasingly executed in data centers with energy-efficient hard-ware accelerators since FPG As are well-suited for this task due to their inherent parallelism. We present the H2020 project EVEREST, which has developed a system development kit (SDK) to simplify the creation of FPGA-accelerated kernels and manage the execution at runtime through a virtualization environment. This paper describes the main components of the EVEREST SDK and the benefits that can be achieved in our use cases.