Effective Use of Networked Reconfigurable Resources

Distributed reconfigurable resources, such as FPGA-based accelerator boards1 are expensive and often underutilized. Therefore, it is important to permit sharing these resources at least among the members of the same organization. Traditional resources, such as CPU time of loosely coupled workstations can be shared using a variety of existing distributed computing systems. We analyzed twelve of these systems, and chose five of them, belonging to the class of Job Management Systems with a Central Job Schedular, as most suitable for extension to reconfigurable hardware. These five systems, LSF, CODINE, PBS, Condor, and RES, were further compared based on their functional characteristics and ease of extension. LSF was shown to be superior according to the majority of the 25 identified requirements. The general architecture of the extended system was developed, and the exact way of extending LSF, CODINE, and PBS to manage FPGA-based accelerator boards was proposed.