An Enhanced Relocation Manager to Speedup Core Allocation in FPGA-based Reconfigurable Systems

Self Reconfigurable Systems are completely independent in their management, thus they have the need to internally host reconfiguration management functionalities, such as core allocation, and to store or be able to autonomously obtain configuration bit streams when needed. Within this scenario, the final system also needs to be able to autonomously perform choices relative to its internal management during computation, this requires, in particular, an internal solution for core allocation management, which includes maintaining information on the reconfigurable fabric state and being able to choose where to place new cores upon their arrival. We refer to these two aspects with the terms Empty Space Management and Online Placement Policy and to the global problem with the term Online Core Allocation Management. This paper presents a solution able to combine the online placement of cores with the runtime bit streams relocation to implement a complete solution that can be used in conjunction with the runtime self reconfiguration. The validation phase presents the results obtained in placement management and relocation, compared to the results obtained by the state of art solutions to this problem.