libGalapagos: A Software Environment for Prototyping and Creating Heterogeneous FPGA and CPU Applications

In this work we present libGalapagos, a software environment for multi-FPGA and CPU applications. This extends the Galapagos Hardware Stack, a hardware deployment stack for FPGAs and CPU clusters. Using Galapagos, a collection of streaming kernels can be deployed on any device withing a heterogeneous cluster and any kernel can communicate with any other kernel. Galapagos provides the network connectivity and address translations transparent to the user. LibGalapagos presents the software library that allows any kernels placed on a CPU to communicate to the rest of the cluster, with the focus on functional portability and heterogeneity. This allows the user to prototype the full heterogeneous cluster entirely within software first and incrementally migrate kernels from software to hardware, while always allowing software and hardware kernels to seamlessly communicate.