From FPGA to Support Cloud to Cloud of FPGA: State of the Art

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) draws a significant attention from both industry and academia by accelerating computationally expensive applications and achieving low power consumption. FPGAs are interesting due to the flexibility and reconfigurabiltiy of their device. Cloud computing becomes a major trend towards infrastructure and computing resources dematerialization. It provides “unlimited” storage capacities and a large number of data and applications that make collaboration easier between multiple (not domain specific) designers. Many papers in the literature have surveyed Cloud and FPGA separately and, more precisely, their services and challenges. The acceleration of applications by FPGA and the unlimited capacities of the cloud are expected to be more and more pervasive. As more and more FPGA are being deployed in traditional cloud, it is appropriate to clarify what is the cloud FPGA and which drawbacks of using FPGA in local are resolved. We present a survey of the cloud FPGA works that have been proposed to exploit the advantages of using FPGA in the cloud. We classify these studies in three services to highlight their benefits and limitations. This survey aims at motivating further researches in cloud FPGA.

A Survey of Trusted Computing Solutions Using FPGAs

“…Therefore, it can be programmed to process different data types according to its configuration. As a result, any logical, combinational, and/or sequential function with a fixed number of inputs and outputs can be implemented using a hardware description language, such as Verilog or VHDL [17], [18]. Consequently, FPGAs avoid the long latency process by repeating fetch and decode operations for every single instruction, which can usually hold no more than two operands [19].…”

“…There are several earlier studies on the state-of-the-art of cloud acceleration, trusted computing, and the security of FP-GAs [2]- [4], [36]- [38]. We direct the reader to the following surveys on the use of FPGAs for the efficient deployment of hardware accelerators in data centers and clouds: Kachris et al in 2016 [39], Mohammedali et al in 2018 [40], and Skhiri et al in 2019 [18]. In addition, with the increasing interest in FPGA-accelerated applications in the cloud, some earlier surveys focused on the virtualization of FPGAs and presented different approaches to overcoming the challenges of multi-tenant accelerators [41], [42].…”

Distributed large-scale graph processing on FPGAs

“…Graph algorithms, such as PageRank, can be implemented on top of these frameworks to process and analyse the graph [ 22 ]. The use of FPGAs in combination with Hadoop for large graph processing is an emerging field that has gained attention in recent years [ 11 , 53 ]. By combining Hadoop with FPGAs, it is possible to take advantage of the scalability and fault-tolerance of Hadoop, while also leveraging the high performance of FPGAs for graph processing tasks.…”

Revisiting the High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing for Future Datacenters

“…We acknowledge some quality examples such as the suitability of FPGAs has been discussed in depth in the context of high performance computing and heterogenous computing resources in [1], a new classification of FPGA virtualization has been presented in [5], and state of the art has been explored in the context of cloud computing, as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in [18]. These authors have used the standard language of computer science and written in such a way that it added value to the understanding of readers.…”