Breeze computing: A just in time (JIT) approach for virtualizing FPGAs in the cloud

摘要

In this paper, we introduce a new design flow and architecture that lets programmers replace synthesis with compilation to create custom accelerators within data center and warehouse scale computers that include reconfigurable many core architectures. Within our new approach, we virtualize FPGAs into pre-defined partially reconfigurable tiles. We then define a run time interpreter that assembles bit stream versions of programming patterns into the tiles. The bit streams as well as software executables are maintained within libraries accessed by the application programmers. In our approach, synthesis occurs hand in hand with the initial coding of the software programming patterns when a Domain Specific Language is first created for the application programmers. Initial results show the approach allows hardware accelerators to be compiled 100x faster compared to the time required to synthesize the same functionality. Initial performance results further show a compilation/interpretation approach can achieve approximately equivalent performance for matrix operations and filtering compared to synthesizing a custom accelerator.