Network Enabled Partial Reconfiguration for Distributed FPGA Edge Acceleration

Abstract

Partial reconfiguration supports virtualisation of applications on FPGAs, enabling compute to dynamically adapt to workloads in distributed infrastructure and datecenters. While the latter often makes use of the PCIe interface and supporting infrastructure to allocate and load compute kernels via a host CPU, FPGAs are becoming increasingly popular as standalone resources in edge-computing, requiring them to manage accelerators autonomously. This paper presents a platform that supports the managing of accelerator bitstreams over the network interface on a Xilinx Zynq device without intervention by the Arm processor. We compare against traditional vendor provided PR management for both library accelerators and custom accelerators and show that we achieve a 29% decrease in reconfiguration trigger latency using this approach.