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Cloud deployments now increasingly exploit Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerators as part of virtual instances. While cloud FPGAs are still essentially single-tenant, the growing demand for efficient hardware acceleration paves the way to FPGA multi-tenancy. It then becomes necessary to explore architectures, design flows, and resource management features that aim at exposing multi-tenant FPGAs to the cloud users. In this article, we discuss a hardware/software architecture that supports provisioning space-shared FPGAs in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) clouds. The proposed hardware/software architecture introduces an FPGA organization that improves hardware consolidation and support hardware elasticity with minimal data movement overhead. It also relies on VirtIO to decrease communication latency between hardware and software domains. Prototyping the proposed architecture with a Virtex UltraScale+ FPGA demonstrated near specification maximum frequency for on-chip data movement and high throughput in virtual instance access to hardware accelerators. We demonstrate similar performance compared to single-tenant deployment while increasing FPGA utilization, which is one of the goals of virtualization. Overall, our FPGA design achieved about 2× higher maximum frequency than the state of the art and a bandwidth reaching up to 28 Gbps on 32-bit data width. 

Cloud deployments now increasingly provision FPGA accelerators as part of virtual instances. While FPGAs are still essentially single-tenant, the growing demand for hardware acceleration will inevitably lead to the need for methods and architectures supporting FPGA multi-tenancy. In this paper, we propose an architecture supporting space-sharing of FPGA devices among multiple tenants in the cloud. The proposed architecture implements a network-on-chip (NoC) designed for fast data movement and low hardware footprint. Prototyping the proposed architecture on a Xilinx Virtex Ultrascale + demonstrated near specification maximum frequency for on-chip data movement and high throughput in virtual instance access to hardware accelerators. We demonstrate similar performance compared to single-tenant deployment while increasing FPGA utilization (we achieved 6× higher FPGA utilization with our case study), which is one of the major goals of virtualization. Overall, our NoC interconnect achieved about 2× higher maximum frequency than the state-of-the-art and a bandwidth of 25.6 Gbps