—Recently, high-end reconfigurable computing systems that employ Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) as hardware accelerators for general-purpose processors have been built. These systems provide new opportunities for high-performance computing. However, the coexistence of the processors and the FPGAs in them also poses new challenges to application developers. In this paper, we build a design model for hybrid designs, that is, designs that utilize both the processors and the FPGAs for computations. The model characterizes a reconfigurable computing system using various parameters, including the floating-point computing power of the processors and the FPGAs, the number of nodes, the size of multiple levels of memory, the memory bandwidth, and the network bandwidth. Based on the model, we propose a design methodology for hardware/software codesign. The methodology partitions workload between the processors and the FPGAs, maintains load balance in the system, and realizes scalabilit...
Ling Zhuo, Viktor K. Prasanna