Advances in Electrical and Computer Engineering Volume 16, Number 2, 2016 A Framework for Hardware-Accelerated Services Using Partially Reconfigurable SoCs Octavian Mihai MACHIDON 1 , Sorin HINTEA 2 , Florin SANDU 1 1 Transilvania University of Brasov, 500036, Romania 2 Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, 400027, Romania octavian.machidon@unitbv.ro, sorin.hintea@bel.utcluj.ro, sandu@unitbv.ro Abstract—The current trend towards “Everything as a Service” fosters a new approach on reconfigurable hardware resources. This innovative, service-oriented approach has the potential of bringing a series of benefits for both reconfigurable and distributed computing fields by favoring a hardware-based acceleration of web services and increasing service performance. This paper proposes a framework for accelerating web services by offloading the compute-intensive tasks to reconfigurable System-on-Chip (SoC) devices, as integrated IP (Intellectual Property) cores. The framework provides a scalable, dynamic management of the tasks and hardware processing cores, based on dynamic partial reconfiguration of the SoC. We have enhanced security of the entire system by making use of the built-in detection features of the hardware device and also by implementing active counter- measures that protect the sensitive data. Index Terms—System-on-Chip, reconfigurable architectures, web services, reconfigurable logic I. INTRODUCTION Reconfigurable hardware is a technology that has known a rapid development in the recent years, with a growing number of applications in different fields. The key strongpoints that reconfigurable devices bring, adaptability and scalability, reduce the requirements for dedicated hardware and optimize power consumption. Due to the re- configurability features, these devices are ideal in providing flexible solutions for the design of embedded systems [1]. The “Everything-as-a-Service” paradigm, which emerged with the expansion of cloud computing, enables a service- oriented approach of reconfigurable hardware resources. Such an approach – based on the synergy between the two technologies: reconfigurable and distributed computing – has the potential of bringing a series of benefits for both fields [2]. It can help minimize the design complexity and improve the flexibility in the management of IP cores, by making them available as services by using neutral, web- based, technologies. Also, this approach favours hardware acceleration of certain services that require high computational resources. By offloading these services to reconfigurable devices, they can benefit from the computing parallelism and hardware-based acceleration brought on by the FPGA/SoC architectures, resulting in improved performance [3] and also enhanced security [4] - due to active and passive built-in security features of such devices. This paper proposes a service-oriented architectural framework that implements services as IP Cores in reconfigurable hardware with a dynamic management that uses partial reconfiguration. This hybrid approach – the web services themselves reside on a dedicated web server, but their implementations are offloaded on high-performance reconfigurable SoCs – enables a performance gain due to the hardware acceleration “behind the scenes”, while maintaining the standard, easy- to-use web interface for these services. The main contributions of this paper are:  Providing an architectural model for offloading the implementation of web services to reconfigurable hardware devices as IP Cores.  Implementing an efficient and dynamic management of the IP Cores (installation/removal during run-time) in order to maintain the flexibility of the web services.  The proposed model increases the security of the IP and user data by enhancing attack detection and active counter-measures in the case of a tampering event targeting the SoC devices. II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK While Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and System- on-Chip (SoC) are mature technologies being used for more than a decade, with a multitude of applications, the synergy between the two is a more recent research subject. This synergy has the benefit of bringing together the advantages and solving some of the downsides: by applying the SOA model with its unified and standardized approach on computing resources, SoC architectures gain in programmability while the web services gain in performance, being dynamically integrated in the device’s programmable logic (PL) and thus hardware-accelerated. The hardware-acceleration of time/resource-consuming modules or services is a current research concern in a variety of areas like: image and signal processing, communication networks, cloud computing and so on. One of the most interesting and recent approaches in this field regards the integration of reconfigurable hardware devices (FPGAs) in cloud computing datacentres for enabling hardware accelerated services [2]. This advances a new cloud service model: Hardware-Acceleration-as-a-Service (HAaaS) that offers clients “premium”, high-performance services, that also have the potential of reducing overall costs by lowering the energy consumption (due to the underlying reconfigurable hardware). In this context, the novelty of our proposed model is the provisioning of a generic reconfigurable architecture for the acceleration of virtually any type of web services that require computational resources. 57 1582-7445 © 2016 AECE Digital Object Identifier 10.4316/AECE.2016.02008 [Downloaded from www.aece.ro on Friday, May 15, 2020 at 17:49:08 (UTC) by 212.235.188.5. Redistribution subject to AECE license or copyright.]