Run-time minimization of reconfiguration overhead in dynamically reconfigurable systems

Dynamically Reconfigurable Hardware (DRHW) can take advantage of its reconfiguration capability to adapt at run-time its performance and its energy consumption. However, due to the lack of programming support for dynamic task placement on these platforms, little previous work has been presented studying these run-time performance/power trade-offs. To cope with the task placement problem we have adopted an interconnection-network-based DRHW model with specific support for reallocating tasks at run-time. On top of it, we have applied an emerging task concurrency management (TCM) methodology previously applied to multiprocessor platforms. We have identified that the reconfiguration overhead can drastically affect both the system performance and energy consumption. Hence, we have developed two new modules for the TCM run-time scheduler that minimize these effects. The first module reuses previously loaded configurations, whereas the second minimizes the impact of the reconfiguration latency by applying a configuration prefetching technique. With these techniques reconfiguration overhead is reduced by a factor of 4.