FPGA dynamic and partial reconfiguration : a survey of architectures, methods, and applications

Dynamic and partial reconfiguration are key differentiating capabilities of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). While they have been studied extensively in academic literature, they find limited use in deployed systems. We review FPGA reconfiguration, looking at architectures built for the purpose, and the properties of modern commercial architectures. We then investigate design flows, and identify the key challenges in making reconfigurable FPGA systems easier to design. Finally, we look at applications where reconfiguration has found use, as well as proposing new areas where this capability places FPGAs in a unique position for adoption

FOS: A Modular FPGA Operating System for Dynamic Workloads

With FPGAs now being deployed in the cloud and at the edge, there is a need for scalable design methods which can incorporate the heterogeneity present in the hardware and software components of FPGA systems. Moreover, these FPGA systems need to be maintainable and adaptable to changing workloads while improving accessibility for the application developers. However, current FPGA systems fail to achieve modularity and support for multi-tenancy due to dependencies between system components and lack of standardised abstraction layers. To solve this, we introduce a modular FPGA operating system -- FOS, which adopts a modular FPGA development flow to allow each system component to be changed and be agnostic to the heterogeneity of EDA tool versions, hardware and software layers. Further, to dynamically maximise the utilisation transparently from the users, FOS employs resource-elastic scheduling to arbitrate the FPGA resources in both time and spatial domain for any type of accelerators. Our evaluation on different FPGA boards shows that FOS can provide performance improvements in both single-tenant and multi-tenant environments while substantially reducing the development time and, at the same time, improving flexibility

A cyber-physical system for dynamic building evacuation

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Enabling Dynamic System Integration on Maxeler HLS Platforms

From Springer Nature via Jisc Publications RouterHistory: received 2019-11-29, rev-recd 2020-03-11, accepted 2020-05-05, registration 2020-05-06, pub-electronic 2020-08-09, online 2020-08-09, pub-print 2020-09Publication status: PublishedAbstract: High Level Synthesis (HLS) tools enable application domain experts to implement applications and algorithms on FPGAs. The majority of present FPGA applications is following a stream processing model which is almost entirely implemented statically and not exploiting the benefits enabled by partial reconfiguration. In this paper, we propose a generic approach for implementing and using partial reconfiguration through an HLS design flow for Maxeler platforms. Our flow extracts HLS generated HDL code from the Maxeler compilation process in order to implement a static FPGA infrastructure as well as run-time reconfigurable stream processing modules. As a distinct feature, our infrastructure can accommodate multiple partial modules in a pipeline daisy-chained manner, which aligns directly to Maxeler’s dataflow programming paradigm. The benefits of the proposed flow are demonstrated by a case study of a dynamically reconfigurable video processing pipeline delivering 6.4GB/s throughput