OpenPipes: Making distributed hardware systems easier

Abstract

Abstract-Distributing a hardware design across multiple physical devices is difficult-splitting a design across two chips requires considerable effort to partition the design and to build the communication mechanism between the chips. Designers and researchers would benefit enormously if this were easier as it would, for example, allow multiple FPGAS to be used when building prototypes. To this end we propose OpenPipes, a platform to allow hardware designs to be distributed across physical resources. OpenPipes follows the model of many systembuilding platforms: systems are built by composing modules together. What makes it unique is that it uses an OpenFlow network as the interconnect between modules, providing OpenPipes with complete control over all traffic flows within the interconnect. Any device that can attach to the network can host modules, allowing software modules to be used alongside hardware modules. The control provided by OpenFlow allows running systems to be modified dynamically, and as we show in the paper, OpenPipes provides a mechanism for migrating from software to hardware modules that simplifies testing.

A Survey on Data Plane Flexibility and Programmability in Software-Defined Networking

“…Network-attached FPGA concept -which enables the distribution of hardware design to multiple physical resources (e.g., FPGA devices), is presented in [61]. The proposed architecture, called OpenPipes, follows the basic principles of system design according to which the system consists of multiple modules: (1) processing modules, (2) flexible interconnections, and (3) a controller that configures interconnections, and manages the location and configuration of process modules.…”