RC3E: Reconfigurable Accelerators in Data Centres and Their Provision by Adapted Service Models

Computing performance and scalability are essential ingredients in modern data centres offering cloud services. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide a promising opportunity to improve performance, security and energy efficiency because their hardware architecture can be adapted directly to the application. In this paper we present the development of our FPGA cloud architecture, beginning with realistic use cases and adapted service models for the use of reconfigurable hardware accelerators in a cloud context. Our architecture supports both applications where FPGAs are tightly coupled to host processors and applications using the FPGA for a secured cloud access in an overall homogeneous system. In contrast to other approaches, we model the system as a whole with a more flexible FPGA provision. The application service provider has the opportunity to offer a service with an individual FPGA design or customized secure interfaces to the cloud. For an abstraction from the real hardware and to achieve high device utilization, the FPGAs and the interfaces are fully virtualized. Because of the uncommon reconfigurable hardware integration and our adapted service models, we developed a special resource management system (RC3E) which serves as a hypervisor for the virtualized hardware. The demonstration of an intelligent load balancing as well as the system's performance and flexibility conclude our approach of FPGA services in a cloud.