High-level development and debugging of FPGA-based network programs

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• Nik Sultana (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 19 January 2017, 15:00-16:00
• FW26, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Liang Wang.

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a form of reconfigurable computing device that continues to gain popularity in various environments, most recently datacentres. The principal difficulty with using FPG As is that they require a radically different mindset and tooling when compared to programming more mainstream devices such as CPUs and GPUs.

In this talk I’ll describe some contributions and ongoing work of the Network-as-a-Service project (http://www.naas-project.org/). First I’ll describe the Emu system, which seeks to harmonise the CPU - and FPGA -programming mindsets by facilitating the use of C# to write network programs that can run on either device. Emu provides (i) a workflow and library support for the Kiwi HLS compiler to facilitate the development of network programs to run on FPG As, and (ii) the Pax system (https://github.com/niksu/pax) using which the same network programs can be run on CPUs with minimal changes.

Second I’ll describe “Program-hosted Directability” (PhD), a method to transform programs to improve their debuggability. Programs running on FPG As are afforded frugal and ad hoc debugging support, and need to have debugging features compiled-in. PhD uses a minimal controller language to implement various debugging features, which enables run-time reconfigurability of debug features.

This work builds on the Kiwi HLS compiler (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~djg11/kiwi/) and NetFPGA SUME (http://netfpga.org), and is the fruit of collaboration with Pietro Bressana, Richard Clegg, Paolo Costa, Jon Crowcroft, Salvator Galea, David Greaves, Luo Mai, Andrew W Moore, Richard Mortier, Peter Pietzuch, Jonny Shipton, Robert Soule, Marcin Wojcik, and Noa Zilberman.

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Systems Research Group Seminar series.

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