OpenPipes: Making distributed hardware systems easier

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 system-building 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.