Implementing dynamic web page interactions with a Java processor core on FPGA

In the era of cloud computing, web servers as the major channel in cloud computing need to be redesigned to meet performance and power constraints. Considerable efforts have been invested in web server distribution and web caching strategies, but very few efforts have been paid to improve hardware-favored web services. In this paper, we implement a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based embedded web server that can process simple dynamic web page in hardware. In our design, a light weight web server Lightweight IP (LwIP) is adopted as the basic implementation of TCP/IP networking stack. More importantly, we implement a Java Optimized Processor (JOP) as the hard core processor to directly support calculation required by dynamic web page interactions. The JOP processor is tightly coupled with the LwIP running on a soft core MicroBlaze to accelerate dynamic web page processing. We implement dynamic web pages to process matrix multiplication requests which are actually handled either by JOP or MicroBlaze as our testing case. In our experiment, the execution time by JOP is about one tenth of the time taken by MicroBlaze. As probably the first dynamic web page processing based on JOP in cloud computing domain, our implementation would be an interesting milestone to further improve efficiency of cloud computing.