This week, with the FPGA in place I aimed to extend the UI and network script to the FPGA interface.
First, I extended our earlier hotkey interface to send the query to the board for inference completion. This was done via a scp protocol to ensure security in data movement as the data moves from the laptop to the FPGA through the local network.
At the moment, we have not yet managed to perform inference on the FPGA(accelerated or otherwise). So I have not yet been able to test the return of the file. However, I did take a look into a multi-client approach that is entirely based on the laptop.
What I did was try to pull a flag from the FPGA that dictates whether it is servicing a query or not. And wrapped this in a loop to ensure that the laptop does not send a query until the FPGA is free. And as for the authentication system, we simply start the text of the query with a passphrase embedded into the script and the FPGA will use it to verify the user authentication.
So far, even though we haven’t performed an actual inference on the board, we still seem to be ahead of schedule given that our multi-client approach has made significant progress.