Configuration Sharing to Reduce Reconfiguration Overhead Using Static Partial Reconfiguration

Abstract

Reconfigurable architectures are one of the most promising solutions satisfying both performance and flexibility. However, reconfiguration overhead in those architectures makes them inappropriate for repetitive reconfigurations. In this paper, we introduce a configuration sharing technique to reduce reconfiguration overhead between similar applications using static partial reconfiguration. Compared to the traditional resource sharing that configures multiple temporal partitions simultaneously and employs a time-multiplexing technique, the proposed configuration sharing reconfigures a device incrementally as an application changes and requires a backend adaptation to reuse configurations between applications. Adopting a data-flow intermediate representation, our compiler framework extends a min-cut placer and a negotiation-based router to deal with the configuration sharing. The results report that the framework could reduce 20% of configuration time at the expense of 1.9% of computation time on average.