OpenStack Generalization for Hardware Accelerated Clouds

OpenStack is a widely used management tool for cloud computing which is designed to work on servers and allocate standard computing resources such as CPU, memory or disk. The current trend for integrating different hardware accelerators such as FPGAs and GPUs in the cloud require managing these heterogeneous resources. In this paper, we propose a generalization for OpenStack Nova project which extends the relevant data structures to include these new resources. More importantly, we present a new lightweight Nova Compute module that we call Nova-G Compute that is suitable to work with different hardware platforms and can communicate with the rest of the OpenStack Projects. We implement a hypervisor-like software to enable Nova-G compute accessing the FPGA resources. We perform experimental evaluation of Nova-G using the known and used OpenStack benchmarking tool Rally. Our results show that Nova-G Compute works as desired without any reduced performance compared to standard Nova.