FPGA sharing in the cloud: a comprehensive analysis

Cloud vendors are actively adopting FPGAs into their infrastructures for enhancing performance and efficiency. As cloud services continue to evolve, FPGA (field programmable gate array) systems would play an even important role in the future. In this context, FPGA sharing in multi-tenancy scenarios is crucial for the wide adoption of FPGA in the cloud. Recently, many works have been done towards effective FPGA sharing at different layers of the cloud computing stack. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of recent works on FPGA sharing. We examine prior art from different aspects and encapsulate relevant proposals on a few key topics. On the one hand, we discuss representative papers on FPGA resource sharing schemes; on the other hand, we also summarize important SW/HW techniques that support effective sharing. Importantly, we further analyze the system design cost behind FPGA sharing. Finally, based on our survey, we identify key opportunities and challenges of FPGA sharing in future cloud scenarios.