Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

The flexible use of reconfigurable devices within a cloud context requires abstraction from the actual hardware through virtualization to offer these resources to service providers. In this talk, we present our Reconfigurable Common Computing Frame (RC2F) approach – inspired by system virtual machines – for the profound virtualization of reconfigurable hardware in cloud services. Using partial reconfiguration, our framework abstracts a single physical FPGA into multiple independent virtual FPGAs (vFPGAs). A user can request vFPGAs of different size for optimal resource utilization and energy efficiency of the whole cloud system. To enable such flexibility, we create homogeneous partitions on top of an inhomogeneous FPGA fabric abstracting from physical locations and static areas. On the host side our Reconfigurable Common Cloud Computing Environment (RC3E) offers different service models and manages the allocation of the dynamic vFPGAs.