Automatic Offloading of Cluster Accelerators

Abstract

The sheer amount of computing resources required to run modern cloud workloads has put a lot of pressure on the design of power efficient cluster nodes. To address this problem, Intel (HARP) and Microsoft (Catapult) have proposed CPU-FPGA integrated architectures that can deliver efficient power-performance executions. Unfortunately, the integration of FPGA acceleration modules to software is a challenging endeavor that does not have a seamless programming model. This paper proposes HardCloud (www.hardcloud.org), an extension of the OpenMP 4.X standard that eases the task of offloading FPGA modules to cluster accelerators.