Harmonia: A Unified Framework for Heterogeneous FPGA Acceleration in the Cloud

FPGAs are gaining popularity in the cloud as accelerators for various applications. To make FPGAs more accessible for users and streamline system management, cloud providers have widely adopted the shell-role architecture on their homogeneous FPGA servers. However, the increasing heterogeneity of cloud FPGAs poses new challenges for this architecture. Previous studies either focus on homogeneous FPGAs or only partially address the portability issues for roles, while still requiring laborious shell development for providers and ad-hoc software modifications for users.

This paper presents Harmonia, a unified framework for heterogeneous FPGA acceleration in the cloud. Harmonia operates on two layers: a platform-specific layer that abstracts