What are the advantages of Huawei FPGA acceleration cloud service compared with traditional FPGA development?

Wang Qi, Huawei 2012 Lab

Gao Xuesong, Huawei Cloud IaaS Service Products Division

FPGA development is moving toward high-level synthesis, from gate level to switch level to RTL level to algorithm and future to system level. At the application level, FPGA has a natural parallel processing mechanism in terms of artificial intelligence and big data processing. No device can be right. Therefore, it is an inevitable trend to introduce FPGAs and realize cloud acceleration services in data centers. With the introduction of Huawei Cloud FPGA acceleration service, breaking the high threshold of original FPGA development, testing and application, it has opened a new era of subversive FPGA development!

Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Service - a development kit that better understands your design habits

Huawei has been in the field of FPGA for many years. It has the most professional FPGA development team in the world, and has accumulated a lot of FPGA development experience and IP. These accumulations combined with its leading flexible cloud service architecture can provide users with easy-to-use FPGA cloud services. To sum up, the advantages of Huawei FPGA cloud acceleration service are reflected in the following technical aspects:

Traditional FPGA development methods are based on RTL language development. In the cloud era, FPGAs are used to quickly verify algorithms, allowing software engineers to quickly use FPGAs and other requirements, and promote the need to develop FPGAs using high-level languages ​​such as OpenCL and C/C++. The Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Service Development Kit provides multiple language development environments such as HDL, SDAccel, and C/C++. Users can choose the most familiar and good environment to complete business design and development.

Huawei has accumulated a large number of high-quality and high-efficiency common FPGA design components, such as device-independent ram, byte-level and frame-level general-purpose fifo, and efficient support for absolute priority SP, fair polling RR, weight polling WRR and other scheduling. Components, multi-channel DDR controller, 100G Eth interface controller with PFC and other functions, general matrix operation, Fourier transform and other components, can be used to directly call these design components, thereby improving FPGA development efficiency. In terms of accelerating IP, Huawei has accumulated common acceleration IPs covering various areas of CT and IT, such as network forwarding, network protocols, security encryption and decryption, compression and decompression, AI, media, big data, and database. Through Huawei IP marketplace, users can quickly Call these IPs to quickly build your own accelerated application.

The shell logic provides basic functions such as PCIe interface, DDR control, DMA engine, and flash controller. With years of accumulating high-quality and high-performance requirements in the CT field, Huawei can provide industry-leading high-performance and us-level low-latency self-developing shells to meet your high-performance, low-latency application scenarios. The SDAccel shell, which is the threshold for both sex and low development, allows you to migrate applications based on platforms such as GPUs and quickly get online FPGA-accelerated services.

Huawei FPGA Acceleration Cloud Service also provides a series of development kits that allow users to create user directories in one click and quickly build projects.

No need to master TCL or SHELL scripting language, no need to modify the build script, just need to modify the configuration parameters, the development kit will automatically generate constraint files and comprehensive compilation scripts, making the user's development easier.

Users can choose to perform single-step synthesis, implementation, PR verification, target file generation and encryption operations, or complete the project construction with one-click kit to generate their own accelerated IP.

The Engineering Build Kit provides features such as automatic timing detection and timing builds. Users can schedule any time to build the project. After the project is built, the user does not need to open the log to view the build results. The suite automatically checks the user timing to inform you of the timing of the design in an intuitive way.

Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Service - Easy to use full process verification

In the FPGA development process, simulation is the most important and difficult part of ensuring the quality of FPGA products. Specifically:

(1) In the traditional FPGA development mode, the construction of the simulation platform requires a large number of verification engineers to input, which is difficult, and the verification personnel cannot focus on the verification logic function;

(2) It is difficult to verify the development of dedicated IP. If the purchase of third-party VIP is expensive, it is difficult for users to guarantee the stability of the function;

(3) Using the verification platform to verify the threshold is high, if the verification foundation is weak, it is difficult to control, which is not conducive to the development of verification work.

The Huawei FPGA-accelerated cloud verification platform is developed in the industry-wide systemverilog2012 language and maintained and upgraded by a team with extensive verification experience. It not only provides easy end-to-end process guidance, but also provides a rich set of verification IP (VIP) to meet the various needs of users.

Compared with other FPGA cloud development platforms in the industry, Huawei provides an enhanced simulation platform to meet the needs of more professional users. The enhanced simulation platform uses the industry's proven UVM methodology to provide more features and enhanced performance than the universal version.

The verification platform adopts a completely separate architecture between Testbench and Testcase, that is, users can add, delete, and execute test cases without changing the simulation platform at all. Testbench includes basic stimulus components, AXI4 interface BFM, CPU model, DDR function simulation model, scoreboard, and VIP. The user-customizable part can be dynamically reconfigured into the testbench through the user incentive component, callback, rm, etc. without completely modifying the testbench.

For users using accelerated resources on the cloud, Huawei FPGA accelerates cloud services to provide users with a complete Testbench. Users only need to design their own excitation components and reference models and then perform simulation tests without paying attention to interface timing, platform connection and script implementation. Such complicated tasks greatly improve the efficiency of user simulation verification.

Users can use the coverage reports and regression scripts provided by Huawei FPGA to accelerate the cloud service to perform statistics and closed loop on the coverage of the test.

The Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Service Platform is designed to speed up the user's simulation speed by pre-compiling the simulation library and the method of compiling multiple times.

Huawei will also provide a rich VIP (Verification IP) library, including high-performance VIPs accumulated in its own information field for many years. Such VIPs will cover bus interfaces, external storage, network processing, high-speed interfaces, etc. Users can quickly pass Huawei Cloud IP MarketPlace. Choice and use.

Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Service - Simple but not simple verification platform

The verification platform is one of the most important components of the verification process. The traditional FPGA development method not only requires a lot of manpower to build a verification platform, but if the complex test needs to be completed, the verification platform is often too complicated, unfriendly to unskilled users, and difficult to use.

Huawei cloud verification platform not only has powerful functions and scalability, but also has a simple structure and is easy for novice users to use, simple but not simple.

As shown in Figure 1, Testbench includes components such as BFM, DDR simulation model, and scoreboard for AXI4 interface. Users need to use Testbench only to write their own test cases, incentives and reference models without any attention to BFM, component connections, to simplify the user's verification work. Huawei's general-purpose simulation platform also supports advanced simulation methods such as code and function coverage collection, assertion, and C-hybrid programming.

Figure 1 Huawei FPGA accelerated cloud verification platform architecture

Huawei FPGA accelerates cloud services - aiming for high standards, new models, more efficient, and creating the future

Huawei FPGA Accelerated Cloud Service has opened a new FPGA development model. With the launch of Huawei Cloud MarketPlace, FPGA developers can focus on developing their own IP and selling it at any time and place. At the same time, Huawei FPGA accelerates. Cloud services also open sharing wisdom, which will once again subvert the FPGA development model. If you are an FPGA expert, you can start your own business through Huawei Cloud at home!