Presentation title

Gluon-B: a Modular Board for FPGA Clusters

Authors

Amin Sahebi, Farnam Khalili Maybodi, Gianfranco Mariotti, Marco Procaccini and Roberto Giorgi

Institution(s)

University of Siena

Presentation type

Presentation of a research group from one or more scientific institutions

Abstract

Embedded applications that use FPGAs are often restricted to a single FPGA board or to custom solutions to connect several boards using, e.g., Gbit Ethernet.

We introduce a novel carrier board (namely Gluon-B) to host different off-the-shelf FPGA modules ranging from lower cost to a higher capacity.

The Gluon-B aims to permit to create clusters of FPGAs through a simple interconnection of as many as 255 boards through arbitrary topology and inexpensive USB-C cables.

It relies on the software stack developed in the AXIOM project to allow a 16 Gbit/s speed over a custom lossless protocol, and there is no need for external routers.

We believe this board can provide more FPGA capacity for embedded applications that cannot be mapped on a single FPGA board and require high throughput.

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