Virtualized Reconfigurable Hardware Resources in the SAVI Testbed

Reconfigurable hardware can allow acceleration of compute intensive tasks, provide line-rate packet processing capabilities, and in short, expand the range of experiments and applications that can be run on a testbed. Few large-scale networking testbeds have made any concerted effort towards the inclusion of virtualized reconfigurable devices, such as FPGAs, into their systems as allocatable resources. This changes with the SAVI testbed. In this paper, we present the current state of heterogeneous, reconfigurable hardware resources in the SAVI testbed, as well as how they are virtualized and facilitated to end-users through the Control and Management system. In addition, we present several use cases that show how beneficial these resources can be, including an in-network multicore multithreaded network processor programmable in C, and network-connected custom hardware modules.