Multi-FPGA Management on Flow-in-Cloud Prototype System

FiC (Flow-in-Cloud) is a multi-FPGA system to achieve monolithic large scale FPGA with across multiple FPGAs for computational-heavy applications. The FiC system employs multiple economical mid-range FPGAs and connect them directly with flexible and high bandwidth interconnection network. We developed FiCSW board as a 1st generation of FPGA board in the FiC project. The FiCSW design, since the FPGA is used as both computational resource and the network circuit switch, there are no host server for FPGA needed like other server-based multi FPGA architecture. This design strategy helps scalable FPGA fabric in low-cost. However, from the system manageability's perspective, the strategy is hard to handle multiple FPGA nodes without management system. In this paper, we mainly focused on the management system on the FiCSW multi-FPGA system, introducing the system architecture and implementation, and working application on the FiCSW prototype system.