0. Introduction¶

Prerequisites¶

Running on EC2 FPGAs requires the following prerequisites:

An installation of Spatial as described in the previous tutorial
Vivado and a license to run on the desired Amazon FPGA. We tested this tutorial both on Amazon’s FPGA Developer AMI which contains all the required software tools, as well as locally by following these instructions.

Setup¶

Clone Amazon’s EC2 FPGA Hardware and Software Development Kit to any location:

$ git clone https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga.git

Spatial was most recently tested with version 1.3.3 of this repository (git commit 934000f9a57c0cde8786441864d5c6e0cf42fef9).

Set the AWS_HOME environment variable to point to the cloned directory. Also source the AWS setup scripts. The HDK script is needed for simulation and synthesis, and the SDK is needed to create the host binary:

$ export AWS_HOME=/path/to/aws-fpga
$ cd /path/to/aws-fpga/
$ source /path/to/aws-fpga/hdk_setup.sh
$ source /path/to/aws-fpga/sdk_setup.sh

For example, you can add the 4 commands above to your .bashrc and source that.

Finally, applications targeting the F1 board (in hardware or simulation) need to set the target variable. For example, make the following change in the very top of the apps/src/MatMult_outer.scala application:

object MatMult_outer extends SpatialApp {
  override val target = spatial.targets.AWS_F1  // <---- new line
  ...

The next tutorial sections describe how to generate and run applications for simulation and for the FPGAs on the F1 instances.