A Resource Reduced Application-Specific FPGA Switch

Abstract

Public cloud providers are employing more and more FPGAs as hardware accelerators in data centers. For large applications that requiring cooperation among multiple FPGAs, a network for connecting these accelerators is necessary. Most high-performance commercial switches are designed for general purpose networks, so that have high costs. On the other hand, FPGA-based programmable switches can be customized with minimum necessary functions, but the high-performance full-crossbar design requires too many resources to implement a many-port switch on them. In this work, based on the fact that network topologies of a specific type of applications commonly follow a particular pattern, we show a method of designing and implementing an application-specific switch with reduced resources on FPGAs. Our case studies show that such resource reduced switches can implement a high-performance network with low-cost commercial FPGAs.