Open Stack

Hey all,

On yesterday's scheduler meeting I was raised the idea of bringing up 
the FPGA to the OpenStack as the resource, which than might be exposed 
to the VMs.

The use cases for motivations, why one want do this, are pretty broad -
having such chip ready on the computes might be beneficial either for
consumers of the technology and data center administrators. The
utilization of the hardware is very broad - the only limitations are
human imagination and hardware capability - since it might be used for
accelerating execution of algorithms from compression and cryptography,
through pattern recognition, transcoding to voice/video analysis and
processing and all the others in between. Using FPGA to perform data
processing may significantly reduce CPU utilization, the time and power
consumption, which is a benefit on its own.

On OpenStack side, unlike utilizing the CPU or memory, for actually 
using specific algorithm with FPGAs, it has to be programmed first. So 
in simplified scenario, it might go like this:

* User selects VM with image which supports acceleration,
* Scheduler selects the appropriate compute host with FPGA available,
* Compute gets request, program IP into FPGA and then boot up the 
  VM with accelerator attached.
* If VM is removed, it may optionally erase the FPGA.

As you can see, it seems not complicated at this point, however it 
become more complex due to following things we also have to take into 
consideration:

* recent FPGA are divided into regions (or slots) and every of them 
  can be programmed separately
* slots may or may not fit the same bitstream (the program which FPGA
  is fed, the IP)
* There is several products around (Altera, Xilinx, others), which make 
  bitstream incompatible. Even between the products of the same company
* libraries which abstract the hardware layer like AAL[1] and their 
  versions
* for some products, there is a need for tracking memory usage, which 
  is located on PCI boards
* some of the FPGAs can be exposed using SR-IOV, while some other not, 
  which implies multiple usage abilities

In other words, it may be necessary to incorporate another actions:

* properly discover FPGA and its capabilities
* schedule right bitstream with corresponding matching unoccupied FPGA
  device/slot
* actual program FPGA
* provide libraries into VM, which are necessary for interacting between
  user program and the exposed FPGA (or AAL) (this may be optional, 
  since user can upload complete image with everything in place)
* bitstream images have to be keep in some kind of service (Glance?) 
  with some kind of way for identifying which image match what FPGA

All of that makes modelling resource extremely complicated, contrary to 
CPU resource for example. I'd like to discuss how the goal of having 
reprogrammable accelerators in OpenStack can be achieved. Ideally I'd 
like to fit it into Jay and Chris work on resource-*.

Looking forward for any comments :)

[1] http://www.intel.com/content/dam/doc/white-paper/quickassist-technology-aal-white-paper.pdf

-- 
Cheers,
Roman Dobosz