Concurrent remote group experiments in the cyber laboratory: A FPGA-based remote laboratory in the hybrid cloud

Abstract

With the advent of M2M and IoT, it becomes important for the educational remote laboratory to realize group M2M/IoT experiment environments, where a number of group experiments are concurrently carried out by making use of LAN-connected FPGA devices. Docker containers are employed to realize separate FPGA-Run service environments, corresponding to every FPGA devices. The Cyber laboratory can contain hundreds of FPGA evaluation boards and FPGA-Run service containers. Each of those pairs is allocated to one of twenty laboratory servers together. The Docker Swarm is also adopted to realize multi FPGA group experiments by allocating a set of FPGA board and FPGA-Run service container pairs. Each FPGA-Run Service container consists of a Web server application, a Web-camera motion, the FPGA-run application and associated individual FPGA device driver. A combination of the container and the corresponding FPGA-board pair realized a separate FPGA run service virtual machine. Newly designed gang scheduler issues a set of the Web services to start a group experiment together. By making use of Docker volume plugins, FPGA-run results and recorded videos can be sent to the common faculty data base for post experiment analysis. The use of inexpensive public cloud enables to offload most private cloud side workloads and to be migrated to public cloud. It realizes an easy scale out or shrinking functionalities. The hybrid cloud organization and the use of many FPGA-boards together with associated containers realized an efficient sharing of servers and the FPGA-devices. The use of the Web services and the Docker Swarm manager allow a flexible and easy device allocation/gang scheduling and initiation of group experiments. The paper showed the Cyber laboratory’s applicability for M2M and IoT kinds of remote experiments.