Co-managing Software and Hardware Modules through the Juggle Middleware

Reprogrammable hardware like Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is becoming increasingly powerful and affordable. Modern FPGA chips can be reprogrammed at runtime and with low latency which makes them attractive to be used as a dynamic resource in systems. For instance, on mobile devices FPGAs can help to accelerate the performance of critical tasks and at the same time increase the energy-efficiency of the device. The integration of FPGA resources into commodity software, however, is a highly involved task. On the one hand, there is an impedance mismatch between the hardware description languages in which FPGAs are programmed and the high-level languages in which many mobile applications are nowadays developed. On the other hand, the FPGA is a limited and shared resource and as such requires explicit resource management. In this paper, we present the Juggle middleware which leverages the ideas of modularity and service-orientation to facilitate a seamless exchange of hardware and software implementations at runtime. Juggle is built around the well-established OSGi standard for software modules in Java and extends it with support for services implemented in reprogrammable hardware, thereby leveraging the same level of management for both worlds. We show that hardware-accelerated services implemented with Juggle can help to increase the performance of applications and reduce power consumption on mobile devices without requiring any changes to existing program code.