A dynamic reconfiguration run-time system

Abstract

IntroductionDynamic reconfiguration of FPGAs has recently become viable with the introduction of devices that allow high speed partial reconfiguration, e.g., the Xilinx XC6200 series [14]. Dynamic reconfiguration is usually performed by a software system that decides when to reprogram part of the FPGA and with what. The simplest kind of run-time software simply selects a precompiled circuit and transmits the programming data directly to the FPGA. At the University of Glasgow's Department of Computing Science, the Reconfigurable Architecture Group (RAGE) has a number of projects examining applications of dynamic reconfiguration. These applications have highlighted the need for a more complex run-time system. Rather than developing different run-time systems for each application, as is common, we have extracted a set of common requirements from several applications. This has formed the basis of the design of a proposed, core, run-time system, able to support all of these applications. There are many parallels that can be drawn between this design and conventional operating system design-as the techniques used to manage conventional resources, such as memory and the CPU, are also applicable to the management of FPGAs.The next section of this paper describes three applications of dynamic reconfiguration and their requirements, and draws from these a set of core requirements. We follow this with an overview of the proposed system, and more detailed discussions of the rôles of the identified system components. We close with a discussion of how our system might support other applications in the field.

Occam-pi for Programming of Massively Parallel Reconfigurable Architectures

“…al. [12] have proposed a similar approach in which the reconfiguration process is controlled by a run-time system that is executed on a host processor.…”

Hardware Task Scheduling for Partially Reconfigurable FPGAs

“…in terms of performance, power, etc. A similar approach is used in [6], and accounts for the increased scheduling flexibility and quality [7].…”

“…Burns et al, in one of the first efforts to create an operating system (OS) for partially reconfigurable devices, extracted the common requirements for three different applications, and designed a runtime system for managing the dynamic reconfiguration of FPGAs [6]. Göhringer et al addressed the efficient reconfiguration and execution of tasks in a multiprocessing SoC, under the control of an OS [11], [12].…”

“…To select the proper resource for loading and triggering HW task reconfiguration and execution in partially reconfigurable systems with FPGAs, efficient and flexible runtime system support is needed [6]. In this paper we propose and implement a Run-Time System Manager (RTSM) incorporating efficient scheduling mechanisms that balance effectively the execution of HW and SW tasks and the use of physical resources.…”

Optimal reconfiguration sequence management

“…Dedicated hardware solutions are capable of running many operations in parallel. Many researchers have used reconfigurable hardware units to speed up the application runtime [3,6,7,8].…”