Criteria and Approaches for Virtualization on Modern FPGAs

Modern field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can produce high performance in a wide range of applications, and their computational capacity is becoming abundant in personal computers. Regardless of this fact, FPGA virtualization is an emerging research field. Nowadays, challenges of the research area come from not only technical difficulties but also from the ambiguous standards of virtualization. In this paper, we introduce novel criteria of FPGA virtualization and discuss several approaches to accomplish those criteria. In addition, we present and describe in detail the specific FPGA virtualization architecture that we developed on Intel Arria 10 FPGA. We evaluate our solution with a combination of applications and microbenchmarks. The result shows that our virtualization solution can provide a full abstraction of FPGA device in both user and developer perspective while maintaining a reasonable performance compared to native FPGA.