Communication Performance Characterization for Reconfigurable Accelerator Design on the XD1000

Providing customized memory architectures is key for achieving high-performance with reconfigurable accelerators. Since reconfigurable computers provide limited possibilities for customizing the organization of external memory, a specific challenge is to make use of the existing memory layout in a flexible, yet efficient way. In this paper we build on IMORC, our architectural template and on-chip network for creating reconfigurable accelerators, and discuss its infrastructure for accessing memory. We characterize the IMORC communication bandwidth on the XtremeData XD1000 reconfigurable computer. Based on this characterization, we present a z-buffer compositing accelerator which is able to double the frame-rate of a parallel renderer.