Power-aware routing for well-nested communications on the circuit switched tree

Although algorithms that employ dynamic reconfiguration are extremely fast, they need the underlying architecture to change structure very rapidly, possibly at each step of the computation. This increases the power requirement of such algorithms, which is not acceptable in current devices that strive to reduce the power requirements. This paper deals with the circuit switched tree (CST), an interconnect used to implement dynamically reconfigurable architectures. In this paper, we introduce a new technique called Power-Aware Dynamic Reconfiguration (PADR). Under this technique, we propose a power-aware algorithm for configuring the CST and scheduling a class of communications, called the well-nested communications on the CST. We show that the algorithm is power optimal. The algorithm requires only local information at processing elements (PEs), yet it correctly establishes paths between communicating PEs. We also show that the algorithm is optimal and efficient.