Power Aware Scheduling of Tasks on FPGAs in Data Centers

Abstract: A variety of computing platform like Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and multicore Central Processing Unit (CPU) in data centers are suitable for acceleration of data-intensive workloads. Especially, FPGA platforms in data centers are gaining popularity for high-performance computations due to their high speed, reconfigurable nature and cost effectiveness. Such heterogeneous, highly parallel computational architectures in data centers, combined with high-speed communication technologies like 5G, are becoming increasingly suitable for real-time applications. However, flexibility, cost-effectiveness, high computational capabilities, and energy efficiency remain challenging issues in FPGA based data centers. In this context an energy efficient scheduling solution is required to maximize the resource profitability of FPGA. This paper introduces a power-aware scheduling methodology aimed at accommodating periodic hardware tasks within the available FPGAs of a data center at their potentially maximum speed. This proposed methodology guarantees the execution of these tasks us ing the maximum number of parallel computation units possible to implement in the FPGAs, with minimum power consumption. The proposed scheduling methodology is implemented in a data center with multiple Alveo-50 Xilinx-AMD FPGAs and Vitis 2023 tool. The evidence from the implementation shows the proposed scheduling methodology is efficient compared to existing solutions.