Novel design methods and a tool flow for unleashing dynamic reconfiguration

Paper in proceeding, 2012

During the last few years, there is an increasing interest in mixing software and hardware to serve efficiently different applications. This is due to the heterogeneity characterizing the tasks of an application which require the presence of resources from both worlds, software and hardware. Controlling effectively these resources through an integrated tool flow is a challenging problem and towards this direction only a few efforts exist. In fact, a framework that seamlessly exploits both resources of a platform for executing efficiently an application has not yet come into existence. Moreover, reconfigurable computing often incorporated in such platforms due to its high flexibility and customization, has not yet taken off due to the lack of exploiting its full capabilities. Thus, the capability of reconfigurable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to be dynamically reconfigured, i.e. reprogramming part of the chip while other parts of the same chip remain functional, has not yet taken off even in small-scale basis. The inherent difficulty in using the tools to control this technology has kept it back from being adopted by academia and industry alike. The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) project aims at introducing a design methodology and a tool flow that will enable designers to implement effectively and easily a system specification on a platform combining software and reconfigurable resources. The FASTER framework accepts as input a high-level description of the application and the architectural details of the target platform, and through certain steps it can enable the full use of the capabilities of the platform, while at the same time it should be flexible enough so as to balance efficiently performance, power and area. One of the main novelties is the incorporation of partial reconfiguration as an explicit design concept at an early stage of the design flow. We target different applications from the embedded, desktop and high-performance computing domains. In all cases we will demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in exploiting the inherent parallelism of applications and enabling the runtime adaptation of the platforms to the changing needs of the applications.