From irregular heterogeneous software to reconfigurable hardware

A heterogeneous system is the one that incorporates more than one kind of computing device. Such a system can offer better performance per Watt than a homogeneous one if the applications it runs are programmed to take advantage of the different strengths of the different devices in the system. A typical heterogeneous setup involves a master processor (the `host' CPU) offloading some easily parallelised computations to a graphics processing unit (GPU) or to a custom accelerator implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).This arrangement can benefit performance because it exploits the massively parallel natures of GPU and FPGA architectures.