Customized kernel execution on reconfigurable hardware for embedded applications

Muhammad Z. Hasan, Sotirios G. Sotirios

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

To conserve space and power as well as to harness high performance in embedded systems, high utilization of the hardware is required. This can be facilitated through dynamic adaptation of the silicon resources in reconfigurable systems in order to realize various customized kernels as execution proceeds. Fortunately, the encountered reconfiguration overheads can be estimated. Therefore, if the scheduling of time-consuming kernels considers also the reconfiguration overheads, an overall performance gain can be obtained. We present our policy, experiments, and performance results of customizing and reconfiguring Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for embedded kernels. Experiments involving EEMBC (EDN Embedded Microprocessor Benchmarking Consortium) and MiBench embedded benchmark kernels show high performance using our main policy, when considering reconfiguration overheads. Our policy reduces the required reconfigurations by more than 50% as compared to brute-force solutions, and performs within 25% of the ideal execution time while conserving 60% of the FPGA resources. Alternative strategies to reduce the reconfiguration overhead are also presented and evaluated.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)211-220
Number of pages10
JournalMicroprocessors and Microsystems
Volume33
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2009

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Artificial Intelligence

Keywords

  • Embedded systems
  • FPGA
  • System reconfiguration

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