Direct Universal Access: Making Data Center Resources Available to FPGA

FPGAs have been deployed at massive scale in data centers. The currently available communication architectures, however, make FPGAs very difficult to utilize resources in data center. In this paper, we present Direct Universal Access (DUA), a communication architecture that provides uniform access for FPGA to heterogeneous data center resources. Without considering machine boundaries, DUA provides global names and a common interface for communicating with various resources, where the underlying network automatically routes traffic and manages resource multiplexing. Our benchmarks show that DUA provides simple and fair-share resource access with small logic area overhead (<10%) and negligible latency (<0.2$\mu$s). We also build two practical multi-FPGA applications, deep crossing and regular expression matching, on top of DUA to demonstrate the usability and efficiency.