Configurable computing: concepts and issues

Configurable computing is an area of active research that has sprung up over the last few years. By combining aspects of traditional computing, such as high performance microprocessor and commodity memory devices, with programmable hardware devices, configurable computing attempts to gain the benefits of both adaptive software and optimized hardware. Because the field is young it remains ill defined and often either misunderstood or misrepresented. Fortunately there currently exists a small number of applications which show significant improvement through the use of configurable computing technology, and have sparked much of the interest in the field. The article touches on some of the different types of configurable computing systems that have been either proposed or developed and consider applications that seem to be well suited to this approach, and discuss the open issues in tool design