FPGA Virtualization
Abstract: During recent years, the population of internet users has sharply increased and more applications are utilizing data centers. Telecommunication companies are constantly trying to make communication applications faster to provide faster cellular networks. Moreover, recent computation applications have been analysing very big data and need higher performance. On the other hand, transistor scaling has almost come to its end, which makes it difficult to provide higher performance and efficiency in processors. As a solution, applicationspecific hardware platforms are used to accelerate the applications and improve the performance, energy consumption, and latency. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are the most popular means of hardware acceleration since they are reprogrammable and consume relatively low power. Connecting FPGAs to servers through high-speed PCIe links is the most common way of deploying them in data centers. However, FPGA resources will not be efficiently used if they are all assigned to one specific task or user. One task may just need a fraction of the FPGA resources. Therefore, a single FPGA can be shared among different applications in terms of area and time. FPGA virtualization is done by partitioning the fabric into isolated regions programmed dynamically based on active applications. This thesis proposes a hardware architecture that enables an FPGA board to be deployed on a server. In this design, two isolated reconfigurable regions have been provided on the FPGA to accommodate accelerators. Our design is configured to accelerate Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) encoding and decoding applications for 5G. However, the accelerators can be replaced by any other user-defined designs by simply reconfiguring a region on the FPGA. Compared to the Xilinx SDAccel reference platform for the same board, this design provides isolated regions with 25% more logic resources to be used by the users. Also, the data transfer latency has been significantly decreased to make the platform more compatible with the communication systems applications.
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