Nimblock: scheduling for fine-grained FPGA sharing through virtualization

As FPGAs become ubiquitous compute platforms, existing research has focused on enabling virtualization features to facilitate fine-grained FPGA sharing. We employ an overlay architecture which enables arbitrary, independent user logic to share portions of a single FPGA by dividing the FPGA into independently reconfigurable slots. We then explore scheduling possibilities to effectively time-multiplex and space-multiplex the virtualized FPGA by introducing Nimblock. The Nimblock scheduling algorithm balances application priorities and performance degradation to improve response time and reduce deadline violations. Unlike other algorithms, Nimblock explores preemption as a scheduling parameter to dynamically change resource allocations. In our exploration, we evaluate five scheduling algorithms: a baseline, three existing algorithms, and our novel Nimblock algorithm. We demonstrate system feasibility by realizing the complete system on a Xilinx ZCU106 FPGA and evaluating on a set of real-world benchmarks. In our results, we achieve up to 9× lower median response times when compared to the baseline scheduling algorithms. We additionally demonstrate up to 21% fewer deadline violations and up to 2.1× lower tail response times when compared to other high-performance algorithms.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2022

Author dc:creator

• Reckamp, Paul

Contributors dc:contributor

• Chen, Deming

• FPGA
• Virtualization
• Scheduling

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2022 Paul Reckamp

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/115575

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F115575