VineTalk: Simplifying software access and sharing of FPGAs in datacenters

FPGA-based accelerators are becoming first class citizens in data centers. Adding FPGAs in data centers can lead to higher compute densities with improved energy efficiency for latency critical workloads, such as financial applications. However FPGA deployment in datacenters brings difficulties both to application developers, and cloud providers. Application writers need to deal with the interfacing of FPGAs on top of application logic/algorithms. On the other hand, cloud providers are reluctant face the risk that their hardware remains underutilized, due to the lack of a sharing mechanism for FPGAs. In this paper, we introduce VineTalk, a framework that reduces the programming effort associated with FPGA-based accelerators and FPGA virtualization. We integrate VineTalk with the Xilinx SDAccel development framework and we map it to the Kintex UltraScale FPGA. Our preliminary evaluation with a use-case of financial applications shows that VineTalk can offer effective FPGA sharing introducing less than 4% overhead to application execution time.