Testbeds and Research Infrastructure: Development of Networks and Communities. 9th International ICST Conference, TridentCom 2014, Guangzhou, China, May 5-7, 2014, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Virtualized Reconfigurable Hardware Resources in the SAVI Testbed

Download
621 downloads
  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-13326-3_6,
        author={Stuart Byma and Hadi Bannazadeh and Alberto Leon-Garcia and J. Steffan and Paul Chow},
        title={Virtualized Reconfigurable Hardware Resources in the SAVI Testbed},
        proceedings={Testbeds and Research Infrastructure: Development of Networks and Communities. 9th International ICST Conference, TridentCom 2014, Guangzhou, China, May 5-7, 2014, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={TRIDENTCOM},
        year={2014},
        month={11},
        keywords={Testbeds Reconfigurable hardware Virtualization},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-319-13326-3_6}
    }
    
  • Stuart Byma
    Hadi Bannazadeh
    Alberto Leon-Garcia
    J. Steffan
    Paul Chow
    Year: 2014
    Virtualized Reconfigurable Hardware Resources in the SAVI Testbed
    TRIDENTCOM
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-13326-3_6
Stuart Byma1,*, Hadi Bannazadeh1,*, Alberto Leon-Garcia1,*, J. Steffan1,*, Paul Chow1,*
  • 1: University of Toronto
*Contact email: bymastua@eecg.toronto.edu, hadi.bannazadeh@utoronto.ca, alberto.leongarcia@utoronto.ca, steffan@eecg.toronto.edu, pc@eecg.toronto.edu

Abstract

Reconfigurable hardware can allow acceleration of compute intensive tasks, provide line-rate packet processing capabilities, and in short, expand the range of experiments and applications that can be run on a testbed. Few large-scale networking testbeds have made any concerted effort towards the inclusion of virtualized reconfigurable devices, such as FPGAs, into their systems as allocatable resources. This changes with the SAVI testbed. In this paper, we present the current state of heterogeneous, reconfigurable hardware resources in the SAVI testbed, as well as how they are virtualized and facilitated to end-users through the Control and Management system. In addition, we present several use cases that show how beneficial these resources can be, including an in-network multicore multithreaded network processor programmable in C, and network-connected custom hardware modules.