High performance context switching for virtualized FPGA accelerators

• Main Authors: Roberts, David A, Cheng, Kevin Y, Brantley, William C
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 21.01.2020
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS

A hardware context manager in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) device includes configuration logic configured to program one or more programming regions in the FPGA device based on configuration data for implementing a target configuration of the one or more programming regions. Context management logic in the hardware context manager is coupled with the configuration logic and saves a first context corresponding to the target configuration by retrieving first state information from the set of one or more programming regions, where the first state information is generated based on the target configuration, and storing the retrieved first state information in a context memory. The context management logic restores the first context by transferring the first state information from the context memory to the one or more programming regions, and causing the configuration logic to program the one or more programming regions based on the configuration data.