Partial bitstream relocation (PBR) on FPGAs has been gaining attention in recent years as a potentially promising technique to scale parallelism of accelerator architectures at run time, enhance fault tolerance, etc. PBR techniques to date have focused on reading inactive bitstreams stored in memory, on-chip or off-chip, whose contents are generated for a specific partial reconfiguration region (PRR) and modified on demand for configuration into a PRR at a different location. As an alternative, we propose a PRR-PRR relocation technique to generate source and destination addresses, read the bitstream from an active PRR (source) in a non-intrusive manner, and write it to destination PRR. We describe two options of realizing this on Xilinx Virtex 4 FPGAs: (a) hardware-based accelerated relocation circuit (ARC) and (b) a software solution executed on Microblaze. A comparative performance analysis to highlight the speed-up obtained using ARC is presented. For real test cases, performance of our implementations are compared to estimated performances of two state of the art methods.
Index Terms:
Reconfigurable hardware, Emerging technologies, Performance Analysis and Design Aids
Citation:
Arvind Sudarsanam, Ramachandra Kallam, Aravind Dasu, "PRR-PRR Dynamic Relocation," IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, 22 Oct. 2009. IEEE computer Society Digital Library. IEEE Computer Society, <http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/L-CA.2009.49>