The Role of CAD Frameworks in Heterogeneous FPGA-Based Cloud Systems

ADD: Accelerator Design and Deploy ‐ A tool for FPGA high‐performance dataflow computing

“…In last decade, the big data era, research centers and numerous enterprises (such as Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, Maxeler, BlueBee, Convey Computer, and Nallatech) have presented FPGA‐based approaches to provide high‐performance solutions . Amazon launched the Amazon EC2 F1 to provide FPGA computing instances as a cloud service, which intends to make it easier for programmers to deploy FPGA accelerators to address the high‐performance data‐intensive. However, the lack of high‐level programming tools and the software community knowledge gaps concerning the FPGA mapping process prevents a deep understanding of how the main challenges could be faced.…”

“…Recently, a high‐level programming platform for streaming applications on FPGA named ST‐Accel was proposed and validated on the FPGA Amazon Cloud . A message‐passing‐based host/FPGA communication model is used to avoid the coherence issue of shared memory, enables the decoupled access/execute architecture to maximize the utilization of I/O devices …”

“…Microsoft uses FPGA accelerators in a wide range of applications, eg, network cryptography, neural networks training, Azure workload processing, and Bing web search ranking, which its throughput has been improved by 95% with only 10% more power consumption. Since 2017, Amazon Web Services cloud offers servers with tightly coupled CPU‐FPGA architecture . In 2015, Intel has completed the USD 16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, which shows that reconfigurable platforms play an important role in the next‐generation high‐performance computing systems.…”

“…Since 2017, Amazon Web Services cloud offers servers with tightly coupled CPU-FPGA architecture. 4,5 In 2015, Intel has completed the USD 16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, which shows that reconfigurable platforms play an important role in the next-generation high-performance computing systems.Although reconfigurable FPGA technologies have been around since the 1980s, their utilization as a general-purpose processing platform is recent. Historically, both FPGA and ASIC developers employ Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) to implement their designs, which is usually outside the main expertise area of software developers.…”

“…Since 2017, Amazon Web Services cloud offers servers with tightly coupled CPU-FPGA architecture. 4,5 In 2015, Intel has completed the USD 16.7 billion acquisition of Altera, which shows that reconfigurable platforms play an important role in the next-generation high-performance computing systems.…”