FSC

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FPGA Session Control (FSC) is...

RBoot - Software Infrastructure for a Remote FPGA Laboratory

Traditional FPGA education either involves a physical laboratory room with workstations connected to individual FPGA experimenter boards or simulation platforms. The physical labs are expensive to maintain and requires substantial storage space. In addition, students need to be physically present in the laboratories to access the FPGA boards. On the other hand, simulation platforms do not provide the students with adequate in-depth understanding of design concepts such as synthesis on FPGAs. In this paper we illustrate the creation of a \emph{Remote FPGA Laboratory}, a software framework to aid students and researchers in geographically distributed locations to remotely access a cluster of 64 Xilinx ML310 Boards. To the best of our knowledge, a remote FPGA facility of this proportion is first of its kind. We developed the tools to dynamically power on/off the FPGA boards, upload/download files, configure the boards online and execute synthesized designs on them. The proposed infrastructure requires much less storage space and demonstrates ease-of-use, high maintainability and schedulability across a high bandwidth of users.