VineTalk: Simplifying Software Access and Sharing of FPGAs in Datacenters

FPGA-based accelerators are becoming a first class citizen in data centers. Adding FPGAs in data centers can lead to higher compute densities with improved energy efficiency for latency critical workloads, such as financial applications. However deployment of FPGAs in datacenters is hindered, as both developers and cloud providers face difficulties. Application writers need to deal with FPGA interfacing as well as application logic/algorithms. On the other hand, cloud providers are reluctant to deploy FPGAs in large scale, due to the FPGAs lack of sharing that results in reduced utilization and questionable ROI. In this paper, we introduce VineTalk, a framework that reduces the programming effort associated with FPGA-based accelerators and FPGA virtualization. We integrate VineTalk with the Xilinx SDAccel development framework and we map it to the Kintex UltraScale FPGA. Our preliminary evaluation with a use-case of financial applications shows that VineTalk can offer effective FPGA sharing introducing less than 4% overhead to application execution time.