A Reconfigurable Framework for Performance Enhancement with Dynamic FPGA Configuration Prefetching
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems Journal
ABSTRACT
Many modern applications exhibit a dynamic and non-stationary behavior, with certain characteristics in one phase of their execution, which change as the application enters new phases, in a manner unpredictable at design-time. In order to meet the demands of such applications, it is important to have adaptive and self-reconfiguring hardware platforms, coupled with intelligent on-line optimization algorithms, that together can adjust to the run-time requirements. Partially dynamically reconfigurable FPGA architectures offer both high performance and flexibility. Despite these potential advantages, the challenges faced by designers trying to set-up a functioning system are still significant, mainly because of the still immature design tools and limited device drivers. We propose a complete framework, based on Xilinx's commercial design suite, that enables an application designer to leverage the advantages of partial dynamic reconfiguration with minimal effort. Our IP-based architecture, together with the comprehensive API, can be employed to accelerate an application by dynamically scheduling hardware prefetches. Moreover, a piecewise linear predictor is used to capture correlations and predict the hardware modules that will generate the highest performance improvement. Our evaluation comprises of extensive simulations, as well as a complete implementation of the SUSAN image processing application on the ML605 board from Xilinx. The measurements show a significant reduction of the expected execution time compared to previous state-of-the-art prefetching algorithms, with only a minor energy overhead.
[LEP15] Adrian Lifa, Petru Eles, Zebo Peng, "A Reconfigurable Framework for Performance Enhancement with Dynamic FPGA Configuration Prefetching", IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems Journal |
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