BORPH: operating system support on the NetFPGA platform

This paper introduces the concepts behind BORPH, an operating system for reconfigurable computers. The porting and implementation of this operating system for the NetFPGA platform, as well as the tool flow integration are described.postprintThe 2nd North American NetFPGA Developers Workshop 2010, Stanford, CA., 12-13 August 2010

A unified hardware/software runtime environment for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers using BORPH

Fulltext linkThis paper explores the design and implementation of BORPH, an operating system designed for FPGA-based reconfigurable computers. Hardware designs execute as normal UNIX processes under BORPH, having access to standard OS services, such as file system support. Hardware and software components of user designs may, therefore, run as communicating processes within BORPH's runtime environment. The familiar language independent UNIX kernel interface facilitates easy design reuse and rapid application development. To develop hardware designs, a Simulink-based design flow that integrates with BORPH is employed. Performances of BORPH on two on-chip systems implemented on a BEE2 platform are compared. © 2008 ACM.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

Automated gateware discovery using open firmware

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation describes the design and implementation of a mechanism that automates gateware device detection for reconfigurable hardware. The research facilitates the process of identifying and operating on gateware images by extending the existing infrastructure of probing devices in traditional software by using the chosen technology

Operating System Concepts for Reconfigurable Computing: Review and Survey

One of the key future challenges for reconfigurable computing is to enable higher design productivity and a more easy way to use reconfigurable computing systems for users that are unfamiliar with the underlying concepts. One way of doing this is to provide standardization and abstraction, usually supported and enforced by an operating system. This article gives historical review and a summary on ideas and key concepts to include reconfigurable computing aspects in operating systems. The article also presents an overview on published and available operating systems targeting the area of reconfigurable computing. The purpose of this article is to identify and summarize common patterns among those systems that can be seen as de facto standard. Furthermore, open problems, not covered by these already available systems, are identified

ROACH accelerated BLAST

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-118).Reconfigurable computing, in recent years, has been taking great strides in becoming part of mainstream computing largely due to the rapid growth in the size of FPGAs and their ability to adapt to certain complex applications efficiently. This dissertation investigates the reuse of application specific hardware developed for radio astronomy in accelerating a popular bioinformatics algorithm

Fast Integration of Hardware Accelerators for Dynamically Reconfigurable Architecture

International audienceDynamic reconfiguration of hardware resources is increasingly used in applications as a way to increase performances, resources integration or energy efficiency. As this evolution induces a change of the application execution paradigm, various tools have been set up to develop and manage these applications. But most do not allow direct re-use of legacy code, needing adaptation to match the provided environment. Moreover, partial reconfiguration is only at its early stages, and lacks easy ways of handling. We propose a design methodology and a runtime environment bringing fast integration of legacy hardware accelerators for partial and dynamic reconfigurable hardware architectures. Thanks to it, applications making use of dynamic hardware can be run directly on an Embedded Linux without noticing the reconfiguration flow. Moreover, our design methodology allows providing various implementations of a computation kernel, including both hardware and software ones. The implementation can then be chosen at execution time depending on available resources. In this article, we introduce the generic IP interface description making the re-use process possible. Furthermore, we present the results of a sample application running on our platform using software and hardware implementations. For hardware implementations, we obtain reconfiguration overhead as low as 0.16\% of the total kernel execution time

Run-Time Reconfiguration for HyperTransport coupled FPGAs using ACCFS

In this paper we present a solution where only one FPGA is needed in a host coupled system, in which the FPGA can be reconfigured by a user application during run-time without loosing the host link connection. A hardware infrastructure on the FPGA and the software framework ACCFS (ACCelerator File System) on the host system is provided to the user which allow easy handling of reconfiguration and communication between the host and the FPGA. Such a system can be used for offloading compute kernels on the FPGA in high performance computing or exchanging functionality in highly available systems during run-time without loosing the host link during reconfiguration. The implementation was done for a HyperTransport coupled FPGA. The design of a HyperTransport cave was extended in such a way that it provides an infrastructure for run-time reconfigurable (RTR) modules