An execution environment for reconfigurable computing

Although many studies have demonstrated the benefits of reconfigurable computing, it has not yet penetrated the mainstream. One of the biggest unsolved problems is the management of the reconfigurable hardware in a multi-threaded environment. Most research in reconfigurable computing has assumed a single-threaded model, but this is unrealistic for personal computing and many types of embedded computing. In these cases, there may be several different threads or processes running simultaneously, each wishing to use the reconfigurable hardware. The operating system must decide how to allocate the hardware at run-time based on the status of the system. The system status could also influence the choice of different implementations for each circuit based on area/speed tradeoffs. This paper examines reconfigurable computing as it could be used in mainstream systems, focusing on a proposed scheduling algorithm to allocate the reconfigurable hardware. Our initial tests indicate that reconfigurable computing with our scheduler can easily achieve at least a 20% system-level speedup.

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