FPGA on Fabric gets into self service mode

[Ganesh Chennimalai Sankaran]

Dear FPGA users,

I am happy to inform that FPGA on Fabric has matured and is entering self-service mode.

What is self-service mode and what changes ?

So far, Fabric users can reach out to Fabric operations team with their requests for preparing FPGA with a specific workflow e.g., NEU workflow.

Recently, we incorporated changes to the FPGA workflows so that users can now load their runtimes and reload PCIe without waiting for manual intervention from Fabric support. Apart from this, we published three notebooks covering ESNet, NEU and XRT workflows. These workflows enable performing experiments at their own pace without involving support team. Recently, we added scripts for (i) reverting to golden image and (ii) for flashing and booting runtime such as XRT to the existing Fabric artifact.

https://artifacts.fabric-testbed.net/artifacts/3339af84-fa5b-4f54-a915-fbbbfb44226d

Going forward, Fabric users will be in self-service mode. They will reserve FPGA just as any other Fabric experimental resource. Fabric users should leverage their in-house FPGA expertise to load and conduct experiments. Be it using the existing workflows or experimenting new workflows.

This gives great power and flexibility towards successful and timely experimentation. This comes along with greater responsibility to clean up the environment so that other Fabric users can use the resources in future.

Final note: In a few rare cases, we see that warm reboot and other mechanisms do not restore the FPGA and a cold reboot is required. Please feel free to reach out to us for a cold reboot. Need less to mention that this should be used as a last resort after trying out all other options.

Happy experimenting.

regs
Ganesh

[Author]

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