The VINEYARD Integrated Framework for Hardware Accelerators in the Cloud

Emerging cloud applications like machine learning, AI and big data analytics required high performance computing systems that can sustain the increased amount of data processing without consuming excessive power. Towards this end, many cloud operators have started deploying hardware accelerators, like FPGAs, to increase the performance of computational intensive tasks but increasing the programming complexity to utilize these accelerators. VINEYARD has developed an efficient framework that allows the seamless deployment and utilization of hardware accelerators in the cloud without increasing the programming complexity and offering the flexibility of software packages. This paper presents the main components that have been developed in this framework such as the runtime system, the virtualization and the central acceleratorsâĂŹ repository. The proposed platform has been demonstrated into 2 real use cases; neurocomputing applications and machine learning algorithms. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can achieve up to 25x speedup without increasing the programming complexity of these applications and it also demonstrates how it can be used for large suite of applications.