Integrated scheduling and configuration caching in dynamically reconfigurable systems

In order to use the dynamic reconfiguration possibility on FPGAs efficiently, one needs a support in the form of an operating system to manage both software and reconfigurable hardware. For this support, a suitable reconfigurable hardware model and optimization methods are required. This paper considers the problem of executing a dynamically changing set of tasks on a reconfigurable system, made upon a processor and a reconfigurable device. Task execution on such a platform is managed by a scheduler that can allocate tasks either to the processor or to the reconfigurable device. To reduce configuration overhead of modules, a caching algorithm is integrated with the scheduler. Simulation results demonstrate the reduction of configuration overhead up to 40% by using integrated caching algorithm in the scheduler and compare the effectiveness of different caching methods.