NovaCORE vFPGA: Virtualisation and Immediate Reconfiguration

Abstract

Although quite important in the parallel computing area, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have a restricted application space when compared to other technologies such asGraphic Processing Units (GPUs) or manycore processors. However, FPGAs have some specific features (e.g. dynamic partial reconfiguration) that may benefit certain applications. Dynamic partial reconfiguration, however, may present prohibitive times (milliseconds). This article presents a simple virtual FPGA architecture capable of holding different configurations (contexts) and also capable of switching between those contexts in a single clock cycle. Experiments have shown that storing 4 different contexts increased in 2X the amount of used logic resources. However, the virtualisation overload - relation between used physical logic resources and the implemented virtual logic resources - was 269,9X in average for experiments with just 1 context.

Keywords

• FPGA
• virtualisation
• dynamic reconfiguration
• immediate reconfiguration
• reconfigurable computing