Stuart Byma
University of Toronto
Nov, 2013
Cloud computing is a billion dollar industry, and one that FPGAs have
not yet broken into in a significant way. FPGAs do not readily conform
to cloud computing principals, such as resource abstraction,
virtualization and elasticity, and therefore present an interesting
problem -- can we get user accessible FPGA acceleration, while still
retaining a true cloud architecture? By abstracting FPGA accelerators
as resources analogous to Virtual Machines, we can use the same system
to manage them -- enabling user-accessible *and*
user-programmable hardware acceleration in the cloud, with all the
benefits that go along with it. This talk will present some thoughts
on this idea, and present a method for implementing it the context of
OpenStack, an open source cloud computing management system.