1. Introduction

cloudFPGA is a disaggregated cloud and computing infrastructure developed at the IBM Research laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland. The goal of this research platform is to deploy FPGAs at large scale in data centers.

Rendered-view-of-the-cF-chassis

1.1. Motivation

We built the cloudFPGA (cF) system because we wanted to research the use and the deployment of standalone network-attached FPGAs into the Cloud, but could not find such an off the shelf hardware.

Now that we have a few cF platforms up and running in our on-premise Cloud, we are offering to share them with other researchers around the world. Therefore, if you want to help us develop, experiment, or work with such a cluster of network-attached FPGAs, please get in touch.

1.2. Documentation

You are currently reading the main entry point of the cloudFPGA documentation. These GitHup pages are automatically collected and assembled here from various sources throughout the cloudFPGA organization. The following list summarizes the various documentation sources to help developers find information:

  • Chapter 2 of the current document provide an introduction and a high-level view of the cloudFPGA research project and its associated GitHub organization.

  • Chapter 3 walks you through two quick start examples.

  • Chapter 4 provides an introduction to the core modules of the cloudFPGA system.

    • The corresponding source files in Doxygen style are available here.

  • Chapter 5 provides a link to the README files of every cloudFPGA project that has its repository name pre-pended with the string “cFp_” and formatted as follows: “cFp_<ProjectName&gt;” (e.g., cFp_Kale). This is an easy way for users to have their documentation automatically inserted into the current pages.

    • The corresponding source files in Doxygen style are available here

1.3. Contacts and Authors

Francois Abel (fab7), Dionysios Diamantopoulos (diamantopoulos), Christoph Hagleitner (zrlhle), Mark Lantz (MLA-CH), Burkhard Ringlein (bringlein), Beat Weiss (BeatWeiss)