Network-attached FPGAs for data center applications

Abstract

FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) are making their way into data centers (DC). They are used as accelerators to boost the compute power of individual server nodes and to improve the overall power efficiency. However, this approach limits the number of FPGAs per node and hinders the acceleration of large-scale distributed applications. We propose a system architecture to deploy large-scale DC applications on standalone FPGAs, independently of the number of CPUs. In our architecture, the FPGAs are directly attached to the DC network, making the FPGA infrastructure scalable and flexible. This FPGA infrastructure enables the creation of flexible multi-FPGA fabrics by connecting several FPGAs together over the DC network. We implemented a prototype of the network-attached FPGA and ported a distributed text-analytics application onto such a multi-FPGA fabric. We compared our approach with a SW-only implementation and an implementation accelerated with PCIe-attached FPGAs. The results show that the network-attached FPGAs outperform both other implementations by large margins.