RIFFA: A Reusable Integration Framework for FPGA Accelerators

We present RIFFA, a reusable integration framework for FPGA accelerators. RIFFA provides communication and synchronization for FPGA accelerated software using a standard interface. Our goal is to expand the use of FPGAs as an acceleration platform by releasing, as open source, a no cost framework that easily integrates software on traditional CPUs with FPGA based IP cores, over PCIe, with minimal custom configuration. RIFFA requires no specialized hardware or fee licensed IP cores. It can be deployed on common Linux workstations with a PCIe bus and has been tested on two different Linux distributions using Xilinx FPGAs.