A Survey on FPGA Virtualization

FPGA accelerators are being applied in various types of systems ranging from embedded systems to cloud computing for their high performance and energy efficiency. Given the scale of deployment, there is a need for efficient application development, resource management, and scalable systems, which make FPGA virtualization extremely important. Consequently, FPGA virtualization methods and hardware infrastructures have frequently been proposed in both academia and industry for addressing multi-tenancy execution, multi-FPGA acceleration, flexibility, resource management and security. In this survey, we identify and classify the various techniques and approaches into three main categories: 1) Resource level, 2) Node level, and 3) Multi-node level. In addition, we identify current trends and developments and highlight important future directions for FPGA virtualization which require further work.