Building the Reconfigurable Cloud Ecosystem

Microsoft has clearly made the case for using FPGAs at scale in the cloud and Intel is committed to leveraging the benefits of hardware acceleration with their acquisition of Altera. However, we still cannot use FPGAs with the same ease we have with software-based systems, let alone do it easily at scale in the cloud. High-level synthesis is necessary for making FPGAs accessible, but it is not sufficient. Making FPGAs easy to use for computation requires more than developing accessible tools for creating hardware targeted for FPGAs. The software computing world has a lot of taken-for-granted, sometimes invisible and good open source infrastructure that is missing for using FPGAs as computing devices. The problem is compounded when we want to use FPGAs at the scale of the cloud. I will present the need for some common infrastructure and abstraction layers to support the use of FPGAs for computing at scale, and describe relevant work at the University of Toronto that can contribute towards the development of an open source framework for the use and deployment of FPGAs at scale.