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Published Articles >> Table of Contents >> Abstract
15th IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP'04)
pp. 339-351
Programming Transparency and Portable Hardware Interfacing: Towards General-Purpose Reconfigurable Computing
Miljan Vuletic, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland
Laura Pozzi, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland
Paolo Ienne, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Switzerland
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DOI Bookmark: http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/ASAP.2004.10028
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| Abstract |
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Despite enabling significant performance improvements, reconfigurable computing systems have not gained widespread acceptance: most reconfigurable computing paradigms lack (1) a unified and transparent programming model, and (2) a standard interface for integration of hardware accelerators. Ideally, programmers should code algorithms and designers should write hardware accelerators independently of any detail of the underlying platform. We argue that achieving portability and uniform programming with only limited loss of performance is one of the main issues that hinders the widespread acceptance of reconfigurable computing. To make reconfigurable computing globally more attractive, we suggest a transparent, portable, and hardware agnostic programming paradigm. For achieving software code and hardware design portability, platform-specific tasks are delegated to a system-level virtualisation layer
that supports a chosen programming model-much in the same way platform details are hidden from users in general-purpose computers. Although an additional abstraction inherently brings overheads, we show that the involvement of the virtualisation layer exposes potential optimisations that compensate the overheads and bring additional speedups. As a case-study, we present a real design and implementation of a number of building blocks of such system and discuss the challenges involved in materialising the others
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Citation:
Miljan Vuletic, Laura Pozzi, Paolo Ienne,
"Programming Transparency and Portable Hardware Interfacing: Towards General-Purpose Reconfigurable Computing,"
asap,
pp. 339-351,
15th IEEE International Conference on Application-Specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP'04),
2004
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