RBoot: Software Infrastructure for a Remote FPGA Laboratory

Traditional FPGA education either involves a physical laboratory room with workstations connected to individual FPGA experimenter boards or simulation platforms. Physical labs are expensive to maintain and require substantial floor space. In addition, students need to be physically present in the laboratories to access the FPGA boards. On the other hand, it is often the case that simulation platforms do not provide the students an adequate, in-depth understanding of concepts (such as synthesis on FPGAs). In this short paper, a third option - a remote FPGA Laboratory - is illustrated. This option uses software to allow students and researchers in geographically distributed locations to remotely access a pool of 64 Xilinx ML-310 Boards over the Internet. To the best of our knowledge, a remote FPGA facility of this kind is unique. The infrastructure described here gives remote users the ability to dynamically power on/off the FPGA boards, upload/download files, configure the boards online and execute synthesized designs while sending input and output through the Internet. Advantages include considerable savings in space, greater accessibility for users, ease of maintenance, and the ability to better schedule resources.