high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

With the recent and growing trend of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) being deployed into the data centers, cloud computing service providers are finding it difficult to manage these devices efficiently because traditional server management concepts and techniques are not yet available for FPGAs. In this thesis, we explore how to bring one of these management techniques, live migration, to FPGAs. We develop a system using partial reconfiguration, bitstream readback and memory pre-copying to live migrate a running hardware application from one physical FPGA to another physical FPGA. Our system is transparent and does not need to modify the hardware application, allowing for hardware designed with RTL and/or HLS to be migrated. Our approach can migrate hardware applications that use off-chip memory and that are network connected. We demonstrate this by live migrating a hardware Memcached server.