Architectural Support for Sharing, Isolating and Virtualizing FPGA Resources

Abstract

FPGAs are increasingly popular in cloud environments for their ability to offer on-demand acceleration and improved compute efficiency. Providers would like to increase utilization, by multiplexing customers on a single device, similar to how processing cores and memory are shared. Nonetheless, multi-tenancy still faces major architectural limitations including: (a) inefficient sharing of memory interfaces across hardware tasks (HT) exacerbated by technological limitations and peculiarities, (b) insufficient solutions for performance and data isolation and high quality of service, and (c) absent or simplistic allocation strategies to effectively distribute external FPGA memory across HT. This article presents a full-stack solution for enabling multi-tenancy on FPGAs. Specifically, our work proposes an intra-fpga virtualization layer to share FPGA interfaces and its resources across tenants. To achieve efficient inter-connectivity between virtual FPGAs (vFGPAs) and external interfaces, we employ a compact network-on-chip architecture to optimize resource utilization. Dedicated memory management units implement the concept of virtual memory in FPGAs, providing mechanisms to isolate the address space and enable memory protection. We also introduce a memory segmentation scheme to effectively allocate FPGA address space and enhance isolation through hardware-software support, while preserving the efficacy of memory transactions. We assess our solution on an Alveo U250 Data Center FPGA Card, employing 10 real-world benchmarks from the Rodinia and Rosetta suites. Our framework preserves the performance of HT from a non-virtualized environment, while enhancing the device aggregate throughput through resource sharing; up to 3.96x in isolated and up to 2.31x in highly congested settings, where an external interface is shared across four vFPGAs. Finally, our work ensures high-quality of service, with HT achieving up to 0.95x of their native performance, even when resource sharing introduces interference from other accelerators.