Lab-bc: A Serverless Computing Platform for MIT Educators

In this thesis, we investigate the deployment of real-world Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools in the digital design classroom. Hands-on experience with these tools is essential to prepare students for state-of-the-art research and industry settings. However, modern EDA tools such as Xilinx’s Vivado have limited to no compatibility with a broad subset of architectures and operating systems used by students. Past digital design courses have sidestepped this problem by providing a lab space stocked with research-grade computers - however, this solution is incompatible with trends in remote and hybrid learning in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, we have designed and implemented lab-bc, a serverless computing platform which allows our students to invoke industry-standard EDA tooling remotely. Our system is significant in that it provides locality transparency: in contrast to existing remote interfaces, students may invoke tools like Vivado as if they are installed on their own devices. This interface grants students the generality, ease-of-use, and performance of a local installation regardless of the hardware they own. lab-bc is deployed onto a set of excess servers in our lab space, where despite frequent spinning disk failures and unreliable power delivery, the system provides high-performance, strongly-sandboxed Vivado instances to MIT students nationwide.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Lang, Jay

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Steinmeyer, Joseph D.

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/151412

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/151412