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Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#201

Post by duskwuff »

corysama wrote: post #152
duskwuff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not count on these instances being useful for development. The parts Amazon is using cost somewhere between $30K and $50K each. Hourly costs will be substantial -- it will likely be cheaper to buy an entry-level development board than to spin up an F1 instance every time you want to run your design.

Any recommendations on an entry-level development board?

Digilent Arty [1]. XC7A35T, 256MB RAM, Ethernet, $99.

[1]: http://store.digilentinc.com/arty-board-artix-7-fpga-develop...

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#202

Post by gricardo99 »

krupan wrote: post #66

The traditional EDA tool companies (Mentory, Cadence, Synopsys) all tried offering their tools under a could/SaaS model a few years back and nobody went for it. Chip designers are too paranoid about their source code leaking. I wonder if that attitude will hamper adoption of this model as well?

the EDA tools need your source code (HDL) to simulate or synthesize the design. But with these F1 instances, potentially the model doesn't have that problem. You develop/design an FPGA solution (some type of accelleration), then you provide it as a service. You don't expose your source code to your end customer, or the EDA tool companies.

You do however, potentially expose your source code to Amazon. But possibly not, if you do your design/testing on EDA tools under your control, then deploy FPGA build packages to the F1 instances for hardware testing.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#203

Post by hofstee »

duaneb wrote: post #143
CamperBob2 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, when it comes to learning logic design, if you're not already a programmer you're probably better off. A C programmer will just spend a lot of time learning why the things they already know how to do are not useful.

I actually recommend Haskell. The division between computation and I/O is strikingly similar (and equally difficult to avoid), and they're both declarative systems.

http://www.clash-lang.org/

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#204

Post by gricardo99 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #120
krupan wrote: post #66

The traditional EDA tool companies (Mentory, Cadence, Synopsys) all tried offering their tools under a could/SaaS model a few years back and nobody went for it. Chip designers are too paranoid about their source code leaking. I wonder if that attitude will hamper adoption of this model as well?

Chip designers are too paranoid about their source code leaking. It's more an issue of being able to reproduce an existing build later on. You can't delegate ownership of the toolchain to the "cloud" (read: somebody else's computer) if you think you'll ever need to maintain the design in the future.

I'm not so sure that is the issue. Currently you delegate ownership of the toolchain to the EDA vendor. Sure you have tools installed locally on your machines, but the tools typically have licenses that expire, so there's never a guarantee you can build it later with the exact same toolchain. Also EDA vendors end-of-life tools at some point, so even if you pay, that tool won't exist for ever, and the license will not be renewable.

I do think the issue with cloud is the concern over IP. There are not a lot of EDA vendors, so the chances that your competitor is also using that same EDA vendor is pretty high. I think companies are pretty wary of using a cloud hosted service where you could literally be running simulations on the same machines as your competitors. Can you imagine some cloud/hosting snafu resulting in your codebase being accessible by your competitors?

EDA companies also sell ASIC/FPGA IP, and VIP (verification IP), so there's also a pretty clear conflict of interest if they have access to your IP. So, if you're really paranoid, imagine the EDA vendors themselves picking through your IP and repackaging/reselling it as IP to other customers (encrypted of course so you can't readily identify the source code)?

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#205

Post by gricardo99 »

jeffbarr wrote: post #132
duskwuff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not count on these instances being useful for development. The parts Amazon is using cost somewhere between $30K and $50K each. Hourly costs will be substantial -- it will likely be cheaper to buy an entry-level development board than to spin up an F1 instance every time you want to run your design.

(post author here) You can do all of the design and simulation on any EC2 instance with enough memory and cores. You don't have to run the dev toolchain on the target instance type.

Hi Jeff, Point of clarification for this: In instances with more than one FPGA, dedicated PCIe fabric allows the FPGAs to share the same memory address space and to communicate with each other across a PCIe Fabric at up to 12 Gbps in each direction.

Does that mean you can have FPGAs running on multiple F1 instances connected via the PCIe Fabric? It's not clear if this means FPGAs within a single F1 instance, or between multiple F1 instances.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#206

Post by jeffnappi »

ktta wrote: post #75

If anyone is wondering how the FPGA board looks like https://imgur.com/a/wUTIp

Here's an even better view: http://www.bittware.com/xilinx/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/20...

via http://www.bittware.com/xilinx/product/xupp3r/

Thanks OP

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#207

Post by petra »

jsh3d wrote: post #144

This is amazing! We have been developing a tool called Rigel at Stanford ( http://rigel-fpga.org ) to make it much easier to develop image processing pipelines for FPGA. We have seem some really significant speedups vs CPUs/GPUs [1]. [1] http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/papers/rigel/

Are the speedups enough to negate the much higher cost of an FPGA vs a GPU ?

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#208

Post by grandalf »

ranman wrote: post #2

If you don't click through to read about this: you can write an FPGA image in verilog/VHDL and upload it... and then run it. To me that seems like magic. HDK here: https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga (I work for AWS)

Hmm this still isn't public. Any ETA?

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#209

Post by alexforencich »

problems wrote: post #97
alfalfasprout wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was already a thing. Plenty of marketplaces exist for FPGA IPs. It's just not that well known because high end FGPAs run $7k+ and complex IP cores can be $20k+ for a license.

So if you were to get a cheap license via a service like this, do you get access to the VHDL or equivalent or could you extract it in some way?

Probably not. Depends on how the core is distributed. Either you'll get HDL or netlists, and they may or may not be encrypted. Obviously the synthesis software has to decrypt it to use it, so like all defective by design DRM it doesn't make it impossible to get at the code, it just makes it more difficult. However, a netlist is just a schematic, so you would have to 'decompile' that back to HDL (and lose the names, comments, etc) if you want to modify it. It's also possible that you would only get the binary FPGA configuration file (this marketplace seems like one more for complete appliances and not IP cores) so you would have to back a netlist out of that somehow and then reverse-engineer it from there.

Re: Developer Preview – EC2 Instances with Programmable Hardware

#210

Post by alexforencich »

ktta wrote: post #199
alexforencich wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they actually using that one, or is that just a board that happens to have that particular FPGA on it?

The FPGA in the image is the retail version. But it's more than likely that amazon is using the same one since they don't modify the GPUs although they purchase them on a much larger scale.

How do we know they are using that particular board from bittware as opposed to a board from a different manufacturer or even an in-house design? The linked article does not mention bittware or the board part number.
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