Distributed Processing in FPGA Accelerated Cloud

Motivated by the need of cost reduction, better energy efficiency and agile update and deployment of new services, telecommunication industry is moving towards virtualization, which lead to Network Function Virtualization (NFV) standard. NFV leverages cloud technologies to deploy network functions that are traditionally implemented using dedicated proprietary hardware. Still, the performance provided by current cloud infrastructure does not fulfill the requirements for demanding NFV's use cases. Thus, hardware acceleration should be deployed. The hardware programmability of FPGAs allows them to adapt well to many type of workloads, placing them as good candidates to be used as hardware accelerators in virtualized environments. In this thesis, the CRUN framework is proposed to provide FPGA as hardware accelerator resources in cloud, abstracting the integration complexity while enabling sharable and scalable use of such devices. CRUN architecture allow user's acceleration hardware to be accessed locally and through the datacenter's network. The latter provide flexible connectivity by following the Software-defined Networking (SDN) principles. The architecture enables the same sharable FPGA to be used simultaneously as a co-processor, a network accelerator or as a distributed accelerator in a scalable scenario over several FPGAs. In its current development state, CRUN was leveraged for inference of a machine learning application composed of a fully connected neural network. The main performance target was to achieve ultra-low latency, less than 40μs, for each inference at software level. Only CRUN fulfilled the requirement among the analyzed alternatives, where the architecture is capable of providing latency in the 30μs range in average. For context, high-end General-Purpose Processor (GPP) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) provided latency values of 798μs and 1 897μs respectively for the same application