Dynamic reconfiguration to support concurrent applications

This paper describes the development of a dynamically reconfigurable system that can support multiple applications running concurrently. A dynamically reconfigurable system allows hardware reconfiguration while part of the reconfigurable hardware is busy computing. An FPGA resource manager (RM) is developed to allocate and de-allocate FPGA resources and to preload FPGA configuration files. For each individual application. different tasks that require FPGA resources are represented as a flow graph which is made available to the RM so as to enable efficient resource management and preloading. The performance of using the RM to support several applications is summarized. The impact of supporting concurrency and preloading in reducing application execution time is demonstrated.