SDVM^R – managing heterogeneity in space and time on multicore SoCs

Abstract

The dynamic reconfiguration of recent FPGAs offers an important step to adaptive behavior of Systems-onChip (SoCs). These dynamically reconfigurable systems add another degree of freedom to the design space. When a processing element gets reconfigured using one with a different architecture, heterogeneity spans the temporal dimension, too. Now, the question arises how could this type of heterogeneity be managed at run time.This paper analyzes the challenges of such an adaptive SoC. We show that many of the requirements for an FPGA-based realization are met by the SDVM, the Scalable Dataflow-driven Virtual Machine which has been successfully implemented and tested on a cluster of workstations. Focusing on run time reconfiguration, the SDVM has evolved to a virtualization layer for multicore systems based on FPGAs, now called SDVM R . This virtualization layer allows for a transparent run time reconfiguration of the underlying hardware reducing the complexity of the system's temporal heterogeneity as seen by the application.

Virtual Devices for Hot-Pluggable Processors

“…All physical IOs are handled at OS level. SVDM has been reduced in size and tested inside a Virtex4 with a multi-MBs system [1]. The unique physical UART is protected by a mutex and IO virtualization seems to be implemented by software layers.…”

“…The system's heterogeneity is no longer limited to the spatial dimension (the FPGA's die surface). When a processing core gets reconfigured with a different architecture, heterogeneity spans the temporal dimension too [1]. Drawbacks raise from that extension of possibilities: the number OS software configurations explodes while the average size of the processors' memory does not scale.…”

Virtualizable hardware/software design infrastructure for dynamically partially reconfigurable systems

“…In the reconfigurable computing field, the existing hardware virtualization methods [El-Araby et al 2008;Kirischian et al 2010;Hofmann et al 2010;Gohringer et al 2011;Werner et al 2012;Garcia and Compton 2008;Sabeghi and Bertels 2009] either adopted the partial reconfiguration technique to support specific applications or proposed a virtualization layer that abstracted the hardware characteristics to increase the utilization of hardware resources. From the viewpoint of system management, the preceding hardware virtualization methods lack system flexibility and scalability compared to the OS4RS designs [So and Brodersen 2008;Donato et al 2005;Santambrogio et al 2008].…”