[J-core] Amazon EC2 fpgas?

Carl Perry caperry at edolnx.net
Thu Dec 22 01:52:18 EST 2016


It's certainly possible, but I would think the utility is probably very
low. The FPGAs on Amazon appear to just be attached to the host through
a shared memory bus via PCI express. This means you don't have a serial
port, storage, memory, network etc. All of that would need to be
emulated on the EC2 host which doesn't really help you very much except
for having an the CPU in hardware. The Amazon FPGA product seems to be
more for "I need to compute a specific thing very fast" as opposed to
hardware development. Also since the instance sizes are 2XL or 16XL
only, getting a one of the cheaper development boards linked on the site
would probably be cheaper than running an instance for a month (based on
pricing for m4.2XL on-demand being $350 for one month).

  -Carl


On 12/21/2016 11:55 AM, Rob Landley wrote:
> Amazon's offering instances with attached FPGAs now:
>
> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/developer-preview-ec2-instances-f1-with-programmable-hardware/
>
> Could J2 run on that, and would it be a potentially interesting way for
> open source Developers to play with it? (I don't use EC2 much, dunno how
> expensive this is relative to normal or how powerful the FPGAs are, or
> what it would take to port to that variant. I know it's another xilinx
> so shouldn't be _too_ hard, assuming it's big enough...)
>
> Rob
>
> _______________________________________________
> J-core mailing list
> J-core at lists.j-core.org
> http://lists.j-core.org/mailman/listinfo/j-core



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