Remote SoC/FPGA platform configuration for cloud applications

Abstract

The growing development of Cloud Computing raised the need of making hardware available “as a Service”. Reconfigurable hardware - like FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) - makes the ideal candidate for being integrated into Cloud systems due to their high flexibility and scalability. This work describes the design and implementation of a remote reconfigurable FPGA-based SoC (System on Chip) with a Service-oriented configuration interface over the Internet, and underlines several solutions in order to meet the specific challenges raised by this type of integration. The FPGA board (that can be at a remote location) is configured by a Web Service linked to a JSP (JavaServer Pages) Web-page where the user can provide a bitstream configuration file for the Programmable Logic (PL). On the SoC/FPGA board, dedicated software has been developed to run on the embedded Processing System (PS), managing the downloaded bitstreams and configuring the PL.