In the past few years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have seen a massive improvement, outperforming other visual recognition algorithms. Since they are playing an increasingly important role in fields such as face recognition, augmented reality or autonomous driving, there is the growing need for a fast and efficient system to perform the redundant and heavy computations of CNNs. This trend led researchers towards heterogeneous systems provided with hardware accelerators, such as GPUs and FPGAs. The vast majority of CNNs is implemented with floating-point parameters and operations, but from research, it has emerged that high classification accuracy can be obtained also by reducing the floating-point activations and weights to binary values. This context is well suitable for FPGAs, that are known to stand out in terms of performance when dealing with binary operations, as demonstrated in FINN, the state-of-theart framework for building Binarized Neural Network (BNN) accelerators on FPGAs. In this paper, we propose a framework that extends FINN to a distributed scenario, enabling BNNs implementation on embedded multi-FPGA systems.

“Cloud-native” is the umbrella adjective describing the standard approach for developing applications that exploit cloud infrastructures’ scalability and elasticity at their best. As the application complexity and user-bases grow, designing for performance becomes a first-class engineering concern. As an answer to these needs, heterogeneous computing platforms gained widespread attention as powerful tools to continue meeting SLAs for compute-intensive cloud-native workloads. We propose BlastFunction, an FPGA-as-a-Service full-stack framework to ease FPGAs’ adoption for cloud-native workloads, integrating with the vast spectrum of fundamental cloud models. At the IaaS level, BlastFunction time-shares FPGA-based accelerators to provide multi-tenant access to accelerated resources without any code rewriting. At the PaaS level, BlastFunction accelerates functionalities leveraging the serverless model and scales functions proactively, depending on the workload’s performance. Further lowering the FPGAs’ adoption barrier, an accelerators’ registry hosts accelerated functions ready to be used within cloud-native applications, bringing the simplicity of a SaaS-like approach to the developers. After an extensive experimental campaign against state-of-the-art cloud scenarios, we show how BlastFunction leads to higher performance metrics (utilization and throughput) against native execution, with minimal latency and overhead differences. Moreover, the scaling scheme we propose outperforms the main serverless autoscaling algorithms in workload performance and scaling operation amount.

FPGAs have proven to be valid architectures to accelerate the inference phase of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). State-of-the-art works also demonstrated that it is possible to take advantage of a distributed FPGA-base system to improve performance, power consumption and scalability of such algorithms. However, the hardware resource usage, communication, and the nodes management become main aspects when dealing with an embedded distributed scenario. In this context, FINN optimizes the FPGA-based CNNs with binarization and FARD is a framework that allows the acceleration of fog computing-based application with FPGAs. In this work, we present how to extend FARD to deal with job-based applications rather than the event-based fog computing scenario. In particular, we analyzed two PYNQ-Z1 connected each other and we implemented a distributed BNN algorithm based on FINN's CnvW2A2. Results show how hardware resources vary according to the division of the network when splitting after each convolutional layer.