Programming fine-grained reconfigurable architectures

Abstract

Recently, several systems based on reconfigurable logic have been designed and built. These systems permit arbitrary digital logic functions to be configured in hardware. This ability to dynamically configure such circuits promises to provide the flexibility of a software based system with the performance of custom hardware. This dissertation proposes a high level language approach to programming reconfigurable logic based machines. This approach uses a data parallel variant of the Clanguage. To support this high level language approach, a novel reconfigurable logic device is described. These devices are in turn interfaced to a memory system and used to perform computation. To demonstrate the validity of this approach, several computationally intensive algorithms are implemented and simulated. Among these algorithms are cellular automata, image processing, neural networks, the Mandelbrot set and the Fourier transform. In addition, selected portions of the Livermore FORTRAN kernels are simulated. Estimates of performance and required system resources are reported for each algorithm.