What is FPGA Developer AMI?

FPGA Developer AMI is free-to-use AMI for on-cloud F2 instance type development with AMD tools pre-installed. Customers can use this AMI to design, simulate, and build their designs. It can be used on non-F2 x86_64 instance types.

However, the AMI does not comes with graphical desktop environment. This guide suggest how to install desktop environment and desktop manager on FPGA AMI based EC2 instance, and install Amazon DCV server for remote graphical access.

Considerations for using F2 instance type

• Not all Regions have F2 instance type. Refer to Amazon EC2 instance types by Region and select Region nearest to you
• For the selected Region, check your EC2 instance quota for Running On-Demand F instances. Default is 0 vCPUs and you may need to request service limit request increase. For example, f2.6xlarge and f2.48xlarge need a minimum applied quota value of 24 and 192 respectively.

Launch EC2 instance

Go to AWS MarketPlace to subscribe, e.g. FPGA Developer AMI (Ubuntu), and launch EC2 instance.

Ensure that your EC2 instance have the following attributes:

• At least 4 vCPUs and 32 GiB memory as per documentation, e.g. r7i.xlarge and r6i.xlarge
• Attached security group allows inbound TCP and UDP port 8443 from your IP
• Attached EC2 IAM role with the below policy for license validation. Replace REGION with your instance AWS Region code. Alternatively, attach AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess managed policy.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
       {
           "Effect": "Allow",
           "Action": "s3:GetObject",
           "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::dcv-license.REGION/*"
       }
    ]
}

Connect to your EC2 instance as user ubuntu

Set user password

Specify a strong password

sudo passwd ubuntu

You will need this for DCV and graphical desktop login access

Install graphical desktop and Amazon DCV server

You can install desktop environment and Amazon DCV server using either one of the following guides:

• AWS F2 Documentation: Using EC2 Instances with a GUI
• Amazon DCV Documentation
• Community article Install GUI (graphical desktop) on Amazon EC2 instances running Ubuntu Linux which provides a install script under section Install on EC2 launch

Access graphical desktop environment

DCV offers Windows, Linux, macOS and web browser clients.

You can connect to DCV server using web browser client at https://<EC2-IP>:8443 (where <EC2-IP> is your EC2 instance IP address). Native clients provide better user experience and additional features, and can be downloaded from Amazon DCV site.

Login as ubuntu with your configured password

Do ensure that EC2 instance security group allow inbound TCP and UDP 8443 from your IP

Using AMI

Below screenshot is a DCV connection to EC2 instance launched using FPGA Developer AMI (Ubuntu).

Using

Refer to release notes at /home/ubuntu/src/RELEASE_NOTES.md and Amazon DCV User Guide for usage guidance. For FPGA development, refer to AWS EC2 FPGA Development Kit User Guide. Refer to AMD documentation site for documentation about Vitis and Vivado