Methods of Deployment and Evaluation of FPGA as a Service Under Conditions of Changing Requirements and Environments

Abstract

Applying Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology in cloud infrastructure and heterogeneous computations is of great interest today. FPGA as a Service assumes that the programmable logic device (PLD) is used as a remote (available over the Internet) service with an FPGA silicon chip on board. During the prototyping of FPGA-based projects within modern design flow, it is necessary to consider the processing delays caused by various factors, including the delay of data transfer between the kernel and host computer, limited clock frequency, and multiple parallel-running FPGA accelerator cards. To address these challenges, three techniques are proposed to reduce the required modification efforts and improve project performance. Based on the proposed models, the analytical evaluation of the functioning process of FPGA as a Service is performed to determine possibilities of improving productivity and reducing the response time. The practical experience of porting FPGA projects to new integrated environments is considered. The evaluation of the response time of FPGA as a Service using the queueing theory is proposed. It is shown that scaling and parallelization at the top level of project hierarchy, pipelining, and parameterization allow for the effective deployment of such FPGA systems for data centers and cloud infrastructures. The proposed techniques and models allow for an evaluation of the performance and response time of FPGA as a Service for formulating recommendations to improve technical characteristics.