FPGA virtualization with accelerators overcommitment for network function virtualization

Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) is revolutionizing the telecom operators data centers as well as the way in which virtualization is applied to high performance/high availability scenarios. Hardware accelerators, and in particular FPGAs, are a very promising solution for NFV, both for their high performance, predictability, programmability and reconfigurability. Recently, consolidation is brought to its limit in this field with lightweight virtualization techniques, which require a high overcommitment of FPGA accelerators resources in order to cope with the needs of thousands of guests. The lack of such virtualization support, together with cloud integration and programmability issues, limits the deployment of FPGAs in NFV. This paper presents the Virtualization Manager (VirtManager), an FPGA IP block which enables accelerators overcommitment with direct guest access. This is a key feature to enable the acceleration of thousands of guests, as it is the case for lightweight VMs, containers and unikernels. This paper's main contribution is a novel architecture for FPGA virtualization with support for resources overcommitment, NFV management and orchestration. A performance analysis of the accelerators context switch mechanism is included to prove the feasibility of the proposed approach.