BlastFunction: A Full-stack Framework Bringing FPGA Hardware Acceleration to Cloud-native Applications

“Cloud-native” is the umbrella adjective describing the standard approach for developing applications that ex- ploit cloud infrastructures’ scalability and elasticity at their best. As the application complexity and user-bases grow, designing for performance becomes a first-class engineering concern. As an answer to these needs, het- erogeneous computing platforms gained widespread attention as powerful tools to continue meeting SLAs for compute-intensive cloud-native workloads. We propose BlastFunction, an FPGA-as-a-Service full-stack framework to ease FPGAs’ adoption for cloud-native workloads, integrating with the vast spectrum of funda- mental cloud models. At the IaaS level, BlastFunction time-shares FPGA-based accelerators to provide multi- tenant access to accelerated resources without any code rewriting. At the PaaS level, BlastFunction accelerates functionalities leveraging the serverless model and scales functions proactively, depending on the workload’s performance. Further lowering the FPGAs’ adoption barrier, an accelerators’ registry hosts accelerated func- tions ready to be used within cloud-native applications, bringing the simplicity of a SaaS-like approach to the developers. After an extensive experimental campaign against state-of-the-art cloud scenarios, we show how BlastFunction leads to higher performance metrics (utilization and throughput) against native execution, with minimal latency and overhead differences. Moreover, the scaling scheme we propose outperforms the main serverless autoscaling algorithms in workload performance and scaling operation amount.