Reconfigurable FPGA-based embedded Web services as distributed computational nodes
Robert Brzoza-Woch, Piotr Nawrocki
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439201537
Citation: Position Papers of the 2015 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 6, pages 159–164 (2015)
Abstract. In this article we propose a concept for an experimental class of control devices that use both a microcontroller unit (MCU) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) circuit. These devices can provide the functionality of full-featured Web services that are compliant with the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm. Despite the fact that FPGA circuits are more expensive than consumer-grade MCUs, they potentially offer much more computational power. In scenarios in which FPGA computational power is required on demand and for short periods only, a large part of such resources might, however, remain unused or disabled. Thus we propose a system architecture and software infrastructure that simplify the utilization of temporarily unused resources for performing various tasks that can be offered as Web services on a commercial basis.