Remote dynamic reconfiguration of a multi-FPGA system FiC (flow-in-cloud)

Multi-FPGA systems have been receiving a lot of attention as a low cost and energy efficient system for Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). For such purpose, a bare-metal multi-FPGA system called FiC (Flow-in-Cloud) is under development. In this paper, we introduce the FiC multi FPGA cluster which is applied partial reconfiguration (PR) FPGA design flow to support online user defined accelerator replacement while executing FPGA interconnection network and its low-level multiple FPGA management software called remote PR manager. With the remote PR manager, the user can define the FiC FPGA cluster setup by JSON and control the cluster from user application with the cooperation of simple cluster management tool / library called ficmgr on the client host and REST API service provider called ficwww on Raspberry Pi 3 (RPi3) on each node. According to the evaluation results with a prototype FiC FPGA cluster system with 12 nodes, using with online application replacement by PR and on-the-fly FPGA bitstream compression, the time for FPGA bitstream distribution was reduced to 1/17 and the total cluster setup time was reduced by 21∼57% than compared to cluster setup with full configuration FPGA bitstream.