C++ Templates as Partial Evaluation

This paper explores the relationship between C++ templates and partial evaluation. Templates were designed to support generic programming, but unintentionally provided the ability to perform compile-time computations and code generation. These features are completely accidental, and as a result their syntax is awkward. By recasting these features in terms of partial evaluation, a much simpler syntax can be achieved. C++ may be regarded as a two-level language in which types are first-class values. Template instantiation resembles an offline partial evaluator. This paper describes preliminary work toward a single mechanism based on Partial Evaluation which unifies generic programming, compile-time computation and code generation. The language Catat is introduced to illustrate these ideas.Comment: 13 page

Julia: A Fresh Approach to Numerical Computing

Bridging cultures that have often been distant, Julia combines expertise from the diverse fields of computer science and computational science to create a new approach to numerical computing. Julia is designed to be easy and fast. Julia questions notions generally held as "laws of nature" by practitioners of numerical computing: 1. High-level dynamic programs have to be slow. 2. One must prototype in one language and then rewrite in another language for speed or deployment, and 3. There are parts of a system for the programmer, and other parts best left untouched as they are built by the experts. We introduce the Julia programming language and its design --- a dance between specialization and abstraction. Specialization allows for custom treatment. Multiple dispatch, a technique from computer science, picks the right algorithm for the right circumstance. Abstraction, what good computation is really about, recognizes what remains the same after differences are stripped away. Abstractions in mathematics are captured as code through another technique from computer science, generic programming. Julia shows that one can have machine performance without sacrificing human convenience.Comment: 37 page

Virtual Prototyping for Dynamically Reconfigurable Architectures using Dynamic Generic Mapping

This paper presents a virtual prototyping methodology for Dynamically Reconfigurable (DR) FPGAs. The methodology is based around a library of VHDL image processing components and allows the rapid prototyping and algorithmic development of low-level image processing systems. For the effective modelling of dynamically reconfigurable designs a new technique named, Dynamic Generic Mapping is introduced. This method allows efficient representation of dynamic reconfiguration without needing any additional components to model the reconfiguration process. This gives the designer more flexibility in modelling dynamic configurations than other methodologies. Models created using this technique can then be simulated and targeted to a specific technology using the same code. This technique is demonstrated through the realisation of modules for a motion tracking system targeted to a DR environment, RIFLE-62

Reducing the dynamic FPGA reconfiguration overhead

Dynamic hardware generation reduces the number of FPGA resources needed and speeds up the application by optimizing the configuration for the exact problem at hand at run-time. If the problem changes, the system needs to be reconfigured. When this occurs too often, the total reconfiguration overhead is too high and the benefit of using dynamic hardware generation vanishes. Hence, it is important to minimize the number of reconfigurations

A dynamically reconfigurable pattern matcher for regular expressions on FPGA

In this article we describe how to expand a partially dynamic reconfig- urable pattern matcher for regular expressions presented in previous work by Di- vyasree and Rajashekar [2]. The resulting, extended, pattern matcher is fully dynamically reconfigurable. First, the design is adapted for use with parameterisable configurations, a method for Dynamic Circuit Specialization. Using parameteris- able configurations allows us to achieve the same area gains as the hand crafted reconfigurable design, with the benefit that parameterisable configurations can be applied automatically. This results in a design that is more easily adaptable to spe- cific applications and allows for an easier design exploration. Additionally, the pa- rameterisable configuration implementation is also generated automatically, which greatly reduces the design overhead of using dynamic reconfiguration. Secondly, we propose a number of expansions to the original design to overcome several limitations in the original design that constrain the dynamic reconfigurability of the pattern matcher. We propose two different solutions to dynamically change the character that is matched in a certain block. The resulting pattern matcher, after these changes, is fully dynamically reconfigurable, all aspects of the implemented regular expression can be changed at run-time