Dynamic Scheduling, Allocation, and Compaction Scheme for Real-Time Tasks on FPGAs

Run-time reconfiguration (RTR) is a method of computing on reconfigurable logic, typically FPGAs, changing hardware configurations from phase to phase of a computation at run-time. Recent research has expanded from a focus on a single application at a time to encompass a view of the reconfigurable logic as a resource shared among multiple applications or users. In real-time system design, task deadlines play an important role. Real-time multi-tasking systems not only need to support sharing of the resources in space, but also need to guarantee execution of the tasks. At the operating system level, sharing logic gates, wires, and I/O pins among multiple tasks needs to be managed. From the high level standpoint, access to the resources needs to be scheduled according to task deadlines. This thesis describes a task allocator for scheduling, placing, and compacting tasks on a shared FPGA under real-time constraints. Our consideration of task deadlines is novel in the setting of handling multiple simultaneous tasks in RTR. Software simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. The results indicate significant improvement by decreasing the number of tasks rejected

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Jerry L. Trahan for giving me his valuable guidance and insight during the course of this research work. I also acknowledge and appreciate the help rendered by Drs. Vaidyanathan Ramachandran, and Subhash C. Kak during the course of my graduate study. Thanks are also due to Dr. Susan Welsh of The Coastal Studies Institute for her constant support, encouragement and for also providing me with a graduate research assistantship. I would also like to thank my parents and my sister for their moral and academic support through all my academic endeavors. Finally, I would also like to thank all the graduate students of The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for making my stay in Baton Rouge a pleasant one. ii TABLE OF CONTENT