Synthesis of application accelerators on Runtime Reconfigurable Hardware

Abstract

Application accelerators are predominantly ASICs. The cost of ASIC solutions are order of magnitudes higher than programmable processing cores. Despite this, ASIC solutions are preferred when both high performance and low power is the target. ASICs offer no flexibility in terms of it being able to cater to application derivatives, unless this has been provisioned for at the time of design. In this paper we define the architecture of Runtime Reconfigurable Hardware (RRH) as the platform for application acceleration. The proposed RRH is a homogeneous fabric comprising computing, storage and communicating resources. We also propose a synthesis methodology to realize application written a high level language (HLL) on the RRH. Applications described in HLL is compiled into application substructures. For each application substructure a set of Compute Elements interconnected in a manner that closely matches the communication pattern within it, is allocated. CEs in such a configuration is called a hardware affine. Hardware Affines are carved out on the RRH at runtime. These hardware affines are defined at compile time, and are provisioned at runtime on the fabric. By virtue of the fact that these hardware affines are NOT instruction set processor cores or Logic Elements as in FPGAs, we bear the performance and power advantage of an ASIC, and the hardware reconfigurability/programmability of that of an FPGA/Instruction Set Processor.