A Remote FPGA Laboratory as a Cloud Microservice

In this paper, we propose a web-based microservice for programming FPGAs remotely in the cloud without requiring additional hardware or third party software. Docker and Docker-compose are used to implement a scalable, secure environment for FPGA design and operation. The paper further describes in detail the architectural design, user interface, tool flow, and hardware back-end of the FPGA cloud service. The Docker files are made publicly available at GitHub.

I. Introduction

The virtualization of resources in the cloud provides scalability and flexibility. The scalability comes from the uniformity in the cloud infrastructure where servers can be easily added to the cloud cluster to increase the available computing power. Flexibility is achieved from the virtualized environment where jobs are scattered all over the clouds and the tasks can be moved as needed even during the execution.