Static hardware task placement on multi-context FPGA using hybrid genetic algorithm

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming pervasive in various kinds of computationally demanding applications. Working in a tightly coupled processor-coprocessor architecture, FPGAs are often anticipated to accelerate multiple fine-grained or coarse-grained tasks simultaneously. Single-context FPGAs are commonly used in such systems. With the recent development of emerging memory technologies, multi-context FPGAs that support dynamic reconfiguration with high-density non-volatile memories become feasible. Compared to single-context FPGAs, multi-context FPGAs are able to accelerate significantly more tasks with only moderate area and power overhead. However, the best way to utilize the computation capacity advantage of multi-context FPGAs for hardware task mapping remains an interesting and unexploited problem. In this paper, we first propose the framework of a processor-coprocessor architecture with multi-context FPGA as the coprocessor for multiple-task acceleration. Under the framework, a hybrid placement strategy based on genetic and greedy algorithms is proposed to efficiently place a set of tasks onto the multi-context FPGA to achieve the best logic capacity utilization. Experiments on real and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm compared with other general approaches.