FPGA accelerated parsing

By default, Bolson parses and converts JSONs using Arrow's built-in JSON parser. Bolson can also run with FPGA-accelerated parsing enabled for specific, hard coded schemas.

Fletcher/Intel OPAE

Prerequisites

• A system set up according to the setup instructions for Fletcher OPAE.
• The correct bitstream for a specific Arrow schema & parser implementation.

Flash the bitstream

Make sure to first flash the bitstream. From the Fletcher OPAE guide:

Start the FPGA development environment container for the Intel Acceleration Stack (IAS).

cd path/to/bitstream
docker run -it --rm --privileged -v `pwd`:/src:ro ias:1.2.1

From the IAS container, program the FPGA with the bitstream and exit the container:

fpgaconf bitstream.gbs
exit

Enable huge pages

The current implementation of Fletcher OPAE based accelerators requires huge pages to be enabled.

On a CentOS system, they can be enabled by root users as follows:

sudo su
echo 32 | tee /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-1048576kB/nr_hugepages
exit

Run Bolson with FPGA-accelerated parser implementation

Run Bolson with the -p or --parser option followed by the name of the implementation of to select which FPGA-accelerated parser implementation to use for the respective subcommand (stream or bench convert).

To see which implementations are available, run Bolson with <subcommand> --help.

Example:

bolson bench convert path/to/schema.as -p opae-battery