Performance Study of Multi-tenant Cloud FPGAs

Abstract

Cloud deployments now increasingly provision FPGA accelerators as part of virtual instances. While commercial clouds still essentially expose single-tenant FPGAs to the users, the growing demand for hardware acceleration raises the need for architectures supporting FPGA multi-tenancy. In this work, we explore the trade-off between hardware consolidation and performance. Experiments show that FPGA multi-tenancy increases hardware utilization and decreases IO performance in the order of microseconds compared to the single-tenant model. The experiments also demonstrate that implementing on-chip communication between the hardware workloads of a cloud user significantly reduces the overall communication overhead.