Abstract: For professionals, FPGA (field programmable gate array) is no stranger, because of its hardware parallel acceleration ability and programmable characteristics, in the field of traditional communication and IC design can be said to shine, has been widely used. However, most people don’t know much about it.


For professionals, FPGA (Field programmable gate array) is no stranger, because of its hardware parallel acceleration capability and programmable characteristics, in the field of traditional communication and IC design can be said to shine, has been widely used. However, most people don’t know much about it.

The development threshold is too high, the hardware acceleration algorithm release and deployment protection requirements are very high, the use of FPGA has not entered the ordinary people. As a result, the computing potential of FPGA has not been deeply tapped.

Application in frequency in recent years, the FPGA, including life-saving medical systems, wireless computing and mobile application oriented IT equipment, hd and 3 d TV, car navigation, driver assistance and infotainment systems and video surveillance camera system, and other fields, and even be used on the Mars reconnaissance orbiter space mission, the FPGA is becoming less cold. Microsoft has said it will use FPgas to “replace” cpus in data centres. This series of actions have to let us pay attention to the calculation potential of FPGA.

First, why is FPGA fast?

Mention FPGA to say von Neumann structure, CPU and GPU. Both are instruction decoding execution and shared memory. In contrast, FPGA is more efficient than CPU or even GPU, which is essentially a benefit of the no-instruction, no-shared memory architecture.

After years of extensive development, traditional CPU-based single architecture cloud services are gradually difficult to maintain the rapidly growing computing demand. It has become a trend to use FPGA to develop high energy efficiency custom hardware in the cloud to reduce computing cost.

Relying on the ali Cloud platform system developed and perfected for many years, Ali Cloud extends from VM image to FPGA image, bringing FPGA technology into the mainstream Internet market.

FAAS platform simplifies the FPGA development and deployment process

In addition to the wide application of traditional communication field, As a heterogeneous accelerator, ALIBABA Group is increasingly using FPGA for business acceleration. However, as these heterogeneous accelerators cannot be systematically managed, they cannot be incorporated into the whole Ali Cloud Flying system for service output.

Ali cloud development platform for the sainty (FAAS shuntian platform), provides with a public cloud flying system compatible with the unification of the software and hardware interface and high efficiency of the FPGA development architecture, can safely protect the core of FPGA IP distributed deployment, effectively support the external customers and ali group, large-scale FPGA accelerate business and heterogeneous computing ecological construction.

In ali’s internal taobao image project, the computing power provided by a single FPGA-F3 dual-card server is equivalent to about 7 CPU servers, which greatly reduces Capex cost. In addition, by simplifying operation and maintenance control, Opex cost and TCO are also greatly reduced, and TCO is 40% lower than CPU server.

In terms of process simplification, 
 Ali cloud FaaS Sainty platform is also a full effort. It avoids the long cycle of traditional FPGA development principle design, PCB design, PCB production, assembly test and board startup and debugging, which greatly simplifies the whole FPGA design process.

Use FaaS instances without hardware cycles; Logic design stage, can also directly skip board start debugging and interface debugging, can directly start user logic design; Moreover, the provision of roles can simplify or omit the design of some user logic.

Moreover, Ali Cloud FaaS Sainty platform also strengthens the security system enhancement, and deeply integrates the control system with Feitian proprietary cloud STACK, enabling the FPGA development, management and deployment of customers’ proprietary cloud scenarios. In addition to fully compatible with Ali Cloud Flying system, and ali Cloud ecological components are also fully integrated, so as to better support FPGA heterogeneous acceleration in various cloud forms of application scenarios.

summary

Overall FaaS shuntian ali cloud platform can support comprehensive cloud form, is the world’s first can output proprietary cloud and public cloud, cloud on FPGA development, deployment, controls, IP distribution in an unified platform, and ecological comprehensive through ali cloud, for the user to create healthy, strong on the cloud of the FPGA heterogeneous computing environment. Through the convenient output of cost-effective computing power on the cloud, the convenience of FPGA development is at your fingertips.

Learn more about the fpga please stamp: www.aliyun.com/product/ecs…

Learn more about ali cloud products: www.aliyun.com/product/lis…

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