System-level parallelism and concurrency maximisation in reconfigurable computing applications

: Reconfigurable Computers can leverage the synergism between conventional processors and FPGAs to provide both hardware functionalities and general-purpose computers flexibility. In a large class of applications on these platforms, the data-transfer overheads can be comparable or even greater than the useful computations which can degrade the overall performance. In this paper, we perform a theoretical and experimental study of this specific limitation. The mathematical formulation of the problem has been experimentally verified on the state-of-the-art reconfigurable platform, SRC-6E. We demonstrate and quantify the possible solution to this problem that exploits the system-level parallelism within reconfigurable machines.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: IJES
• Authors: Esam El-Araby, Mohamed Taher, Kris Gaj, Tarek A. El-Ghazawi, David Caliga, Nikitas A. Alexandridis
• Keywords: General-purpose Computers, IJES 2006, Reconfigurable Computers, State-of-the-art Reconfigurable Platform