Deploying Multi-tenant FPGAs within Linux-based Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud deployments now increasingly exploit Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerators as part of virtual instances. While cloud FPGAs are still essentially single-tenant, the growing demand for efficient hardware acceleration paves the way to FPGA multi-tenancy. It then becomes necessary to explore architectures, design flows, and resource management features that aim at exposing multi-tenant FPGAs to the cloud users. In this article, we discuss a hardware/software architecture that supports provisioning space-shared FPGAs in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) clouds. The proposed hardware/software architecture introduces an FPGA organization that improves hardware consolidation and support hardware elasticity with minimal data movement overhead. It also relies on VirtIO to decrease communication latency between hardware and software domains. Prototyping the proposed architecture with a Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA demonstrated near specification maximum frequency for on-chip data movement and high throughput in virtual instance access to hardware accelerators. We demonstrate similar performance compared to single-tenant deployment while increasing FPGA utilization, which is one of the goals of virtualization. Overall, our FPGA design achieved about 2× higher maximum frequency than the state of the art and a bandwidth reaching up to 28 Gbps on 32-bit data width.

Software Architecture

What is software architecture? A clear and simple definition is that software architecture is about making important design decisions that you want to get right early in the development of a software system because, in the future, they are costly to change. Being a good software architect is not easy. It requires not only a deep technical competency from practicing software architecture design in industry, but also an excellent understanding of the theoretical foundations of software architecture are gained from doing software architecture research. This chapter describes some significant research, development, and education activities that the author has performed during her professional trajectory path to develop knowledge, skills, and experiences around this topic.

FEATURES OF THE SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE OF THE DIGITAL DEVICE DIAGNOSTICS SYSTEM

В статье рассматриваются особенности архитектуры системы диагностики цифровых устройств на базе микроконтроллеров на примере разработанного аппаратно-программного комплекса. The article discusses the features of the architecture of the diagnostic system of digital devices based on microcontrollers on the example of the developed hardware and software complex.

Software Architecture Design of Animation Studies Platform Using Structure-Behavior Coalescence Method

Animation education in the new media era is moving toward the goal of cultivating high-end talents. The development of an architecture-oriented animation studies platform provides guarantee for the training of talents in terms of teaching quality. This research uses the Internet as the medium and mobile phones and computer clients as the main technology platforms, starting from the software architecture and constructing the system model of the animation studies platform according to the Structure-Behavior Coalescence (SBC) method. The core theme of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a modeling language with model consistency of systems structure and systems behavior. This paper developed Structure-Behavior Coalescence State Machine (SBC-SM) as the formal language for the MBSE animation studies platform design model singularity. The model consistency will be fully guaranteed in the MBSE animation studies platform design when the SBC state machine approach is adopted. It not only improves the efficiency of platform development but also reduces the difficulty and risk of platform development.