K-Flow: A Programming and Scheduling Framework to Optimize Dataflow Execution on CPU-FPGA Platforms

Abstract

With the slowing down of Moore's law, major cloud service providers---such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Alibaba Cloud---all started deploying FPGAs in their cloud platforms to improve the performance and energy-efficiency. From the perspective of performance per unit cost in the cloud, it is essential to efficiently utilize all available CPU and FPGA resources within a requested computing instance. However, most prior studies overlook the CPU-FPGA co-optimization or require a considerable amount of manual efforts to achieve it. In this poster, we present a framework called K-Flow, which enables easy FPGA accelerator integration and efficient CPU-FPGA co-scheduling for big data applications. K-Flow abstracts an application as a widely used directed acyclic graph (DAG), and dynamically schedules a number of CPU threads and/or FPGA accelerator processing elements (PEs) to execute the dataflow tasks on each DAG node. Moreover, K-Flow provides user-friendly interfaces to program each DAG node and automates the tedious process of FPGA accelerator integration and CPU-FPGA co-optimization using the genomic read alignment application BWA-MEM as a case study. Experimental results show that K-Flow achieves a throughput that is on average 94.5% of the theoretical upper bound and 1.4x better than a straightforward FPGA integration.