Rapid Open-Source Development for Amazon F1 FPGAs

It's been a long time since our last meetup, which means we have a lot to talk about! We previously discussed how exciting it is to have FPGAs available in the cloud and how significantly this could impact the open-source silicon community. But we also felt the pain of actually developing for Amazon F1.

Well, developing for F1 is no longer a nightmare! In this meetup, I will demonstrate the current state of our open-source effort to simplify F1 development. I'll show a couple of demo applications, including a Mandelbrot application you may have seen already in an earlier form and WARP-V (the TL-Verilog RISC-V core you may also recall) now running on F1. Bring a Ubuntu laptop, and you can even write a little FPGA kernel of your own!

This framework is now called "1st CLaaS" (where "CLaaS" stands for "Custom Logic as a Service"). It was recently recognized by Google from over a thousand Google Summer of Code 2019 projects in a publication on their open-source blog: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2019/09/unleashing-open-source-silicon.html . It was also just presented, by Akos Hadnagy, at ORConf in Bordeaux, France to nearly a hundred open-source silicon enthusiasts, and then reported on in https://abopen.com/news/ .

Repo: https://github.com/alessandrocomodi/fpga-webserver

Thanks to Alessandro Comodi, Akos Hadnagy, and Prakaash Karthikeyan, who you may know from prior meetups who have been active in this project.

Pizza as usual, with donations to cover pizza and meetup-fees appreciated.