Method of creation and deployment of FPGA projects resistant to change of requirements and development environments for cloud infrastructures

Abstract

The subject of study in this article is the modern technologies of programmable logic devices, the history of product changes of leading manufacturers, including development environments, and project optimization processes. The goal is to improve modern methods, technologies, and software tools for the development and integration of FPGA-as-a-Service in the form of services in cloud infrastructures, data centers, and on-board high-performance systems, with taking into account the ever-changing conditions and requirements, and the constraints of platforms. Task: to analyze the history of product changes of the leading vendors and manufacturers of programmable logic devices; analyze the dynamics of changes in the functionality of project development environments for FPGA-based systems, with taking into account the existing requirements and restrictions from vendors of software and hardware platforms and components; perform a comparative analysis of modern development boards and accelerator cards for the prototyping and testing of projects based on the chips of programmable logic; analyze the use of an existing services and solutions based on FPGA technologies as part of cloud services from modern cloud providers; propose practical steps for the development of systems based on FPGA resistant to project requirements change; propose the sequence for the development and optimization of high-performance systems with their implementation based on FPGA; and to provide practical example of the use of the proposed method. According to the tasks, the following results were obtained. The history of changes in the leading companies of programmable logic manufacturers, as well as changes in versions of the development environments and the products of one of the largest companies, is analyzed. The use of existing FPGA-based solutions as part of cloud services is analyzed in detail. Two sequences for optimizing projects and increasing their productivity with reducing of the prototyping efforts during their creation and porting to new versions of software and hardware platforms are provided. Based on the results of the research, a prototype was developed and tested, which allowed the application of the proposed method in practice for adapting and porting the FPGA as a service project during the transfer to another version of the accelerator card. Conclusions. The main contribution and scientific novelty of the obtained results is that an experimental study of the paradigm of runtime reprogramming of programmable logic was performed, which made it possible to formulate the elements of a new method of creation projects as a service for cloud infrastructures, data centers, and artificial intelligence systems. A set of practical steps for the development of systems that are tolerant to changes in conditions and requirements is proposed. The application of the proposed method allows to avoid costs of project support in the case of changes in requirements.

Keywords

• fpga
• пліс
• fpga як сервіс
• хмарні сервіси
• середовища розроблення
• зміна вимог
• апаратні прискорювачі