Apache: Big Data 2016

In our project, we are trying to make easy to use, scalable multi-FPGA fabrics available in data centers. There are several recent projects that try to employ FPGAs for accelerating data centers applications. However, those projects focus on accelerating specific applications rather than making their platforms usable for general developers. To make FPGAs available for various application developers, we are trying to virtualize FPGAs in data centers. We use OpenStack for allocating FPGAs placed in a data center, Apache Zookeeper to distribute the jobs across the FPGAs, and Apache Drill as a prospective application to use distributed FPGAs. As work in progress, our first goal was to achieve functionality. We have observed good scalability and expect the performance to improve as we incorporate SQL acceleration techniques for FPGAs.