Snake: An Efficient Strategy for the Reuse of Circuitry and Partial Computation Results in High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing

In this paper we present "Snake", a novel technique for allocating and executing hardware tasks onto partially reconfigurable Xilinx FPGAs. Snake permits to alleviate the bottleneck introduced by the Internal Configuration Access Port (ICAP) in Xilinx FPGAs, by reusing both intermediate partial results and previously allocated pieces of circuitry. Moreover, Snake considers often neglected aspects in previous approaches when making allocation decisions, such as the technological constraints introduced by reconfigurable technology and inter-task communication issues. As a result of being a realistic solution its implementation using real FPGA hardware has been successful. We have checked its ability to reduce not only the overall execution time of a wide range of synthetic reconfigurable applications, but also time overheads in making allocation decisions in the first place.