Modify project permissions to be able to use FPGAs

[Edgard da Cunha Pontes]

I’m running experiments in FABRIC Testbed for the project “PolKA – Polynomial Key-based Architecture for Source Routing”. Initially, we were exploring the main features of the testbed, but now we are needing to use FPGAs to continue the research. Is it possible to modify the project permissions to include the “Component.FPGA” tag?

[Ilya Baldin]

Hello,

FPGAs are still largely in testing and not everything works yet. For example DPDK cannot yet be used with FABRIC FPGAs. Also FABRIC FPGAs are there specifically for *deploying* bytecode developed *elsewhere* (in your lab or in another testbed) into a large topology. FABRIC is poorly suited for initial development of the bytecode because FPGAs are passed to VMs and initial development frequently requires cold reboots of the underlying server which affects other experiments running VMs on the same server. You can tweak existing code on FABRIC (because that generally just requires a VM reboot when the FPGA is updated), but developing new code from scratch is not feasible.

So if you

a) Understand the constraints I described above

b) Have already developed an initial version of the code somewhere else

you can fill out a project permission request from the Portal and request FPGA permission. Please specify which shell you are planning to use (ONS or XRT).

Other testbeds (Chameleon, OCT and CloudLab) have similar U280 FPGA resources attached to bare-metal servers where the initial development should take place.

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