A Study of Heterogeneous Computing Design Method based on Virtualization Technology

One challenge for the heterogeneous computing with the FPGA is how to bridge the development gap between SW and HW designs. The high level synthesis (HLS) technique allows producing hardware with high level languages like C. Design tools based on the HLS like Xilinx SDSoC and SDAccel are developed to speedup SW/HW co-designs. However, the developers still require much circuit design skills to use these tools more efficiently. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous computing platform based on the virtualization technology, namely hCODE.With the help of the virtualization, the HW and SW design can be totally separated. This brings multiple benefits like accelerating a program without modifying or recompiling it, enable high portability and scalability across different HW and operating system.