FPGAs in The Cloud

As cloud computing grows,  the types of computational hardware available in the cloud are diversifying. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a relatively new addition to high-performance computing in the cloud, with the ability to accelerate a range of different applications, and the flexibility to offer different cloud computing models. A new and growing configuration is to have the FPGAs directly connected to the network and thus reduce the latency in delivering data to processing elements. We survey the state-of-the-art in FPGAs in the cloud and present the Open Cloud Testbed (OCT), a testbed for research and experimentation into new cloud platforms, which includes network-attached FPGAs in the cloud.