Low-latency high-bandwidth HW/SW communication in a virtual memory environment

Abstract

Adaptive computers combine conventional software programmable processors with reconfigurable compute units. We present techniques that allow the high-performance realization of demand-paged, virtually addressed main memory shared between both of these processing elements. Furthermore, we have achieved low-latency communication between software running on the CPU and the reconfigurable compute unit, allowing even fine-grained hardware/software partitioning. A system-level evaluation quantifies the advantages of our approach.