QoS-Aware Cross-Layer Reliability-Integrated FPGA-Based Dynamic Partially Reconfigurable System Partitioning

Abstract

Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) can be used for time-sharing of computing resources within Partially Reconfigurable Regions (PRRs) in FPGA-based systems. The heterogeneous partitioning in such systems allows the user to exploit the application-specific mapping of Partially Reconfigurable Modules (PRMs) to PRRs to implement more efficient designs. It offers increased opportunities in optimizing the reliability of the system across multiple layers - from the low-level physical one to the higher application layer. This method, called cross-layer reliability, can potentially exploit the application-specific tolerances to the quality of service (QoS) to tackle the increasing device fault-rates more cost-effectively by distributing the fault-mitigation to different layers. In this work, we propose a QoS-aware cross-layer reliability-integrated design methodology for FPGA-based DPR systems. Specifically, our methodology analyzes the requirements of the applications in terms of Functional Reliability, System Lifetime and Makespan to determine the best possible combinations of reliability-oriented design choices in different layers. We report up to an average of 24% and 30% performance improvements for single and multi-objective optimization-based system partitioning.