Hetero-ViTAL: A Virtualization Stack for Heterogeneous FPGA Clusters

Abstract

With field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) being widely deployed into data centers, an efficient virtualization support is required to fully unleash the potential of cloud FPGAs. Nevertheless, existing FPGA virtualization solutions only support a homogeneous FPGA cluster comprising identical FPGA devices. Representative work such as ViTAL provides sufficient system support for scale-out acceleration and improves the overall resource utilization through a fine-grained spatial sharing. While these existing solutions (including ViTAL) can efficiently virtualize a homogeneous cluster, it is hard to extend them to virtualizing a heterogeneous cluster which comprises multiple types of FPGAs. We expect the future cloud FPGAs are likely to be more heterogeneous due to hardware rolling upgrade.In this paper, we rethink FPGA virtualization from ground up and propose Hetero-ViTAL to virtualize heterogeneous FPGA clusters. We identify the conflicting requirements of runtime management and offline compilation when designing the abstraction for a heterogeneous cluster, which is also the fundamental reason why the single-level abstraction as proposed in ViTAL (and other prior works) cannot be trivially extended to the heterogeneous case. To decouple these conflicting requirements, we provide a two-level system abstraction in Hetero-ViTAL. Specifically, the high-level abstraction is FPGA-agnostic and provides a simple and homogeneous view of the FPGA resources to simplify the runtime management. On the contrary, the low-level abstraction is FPGA-specific and exposes sufficient spatial resource constraints to the compilation framework to ensure the mapping quality. Rather than simply adding a layer on top of the single-level abstraction as proposed in ViTAL and other prior work, we judiciously determine how much hardware details should be exposed at each level to balance the management complexity, mapping quality and compilation cost. We then develop a compilation framework to map applications onto this two-level abstraction with several optimization techniques to further improve the mapping quality. We also provide a runtime management policy to alleviate the fragmentation issue, which becomes more severe in a heterogeneous cluster due to the distinct resource capacities of diverse FPGAs.We evaluate Hetero-ViTAL on a custom-built FPGA cluster and demonstrate its effectiveness using machine learning and image processing applications. Results show that Hetero-ViTAL reduces the average response time (a critical metric for QoS) by 79.2% for a heterogeneous cluster compared to the non-virtualized baseline. When virtualizing a homogeneous cluster, Hetero-ViTAL also reduces the average response time by 42.0% compared with ViTAL due to a better system design.