Configuration Scheduling for Conditional Branch Execution Onto Multi-Context Reconfigurable Architectures

This paper addresses the exploitation of the capabilities of multi-context reconfigurable architectures to handle a variety of interactive multimedia services. One of the main features of these applications is their changing behavior depending on the runtime scenario, turning the configuration management into a key point. In this work, a configuration scheduler for these applications is proposed. We describe the target applications at a task (kernel) granularity by using data flow graphs in which some kernels are conditionally executed depending on runtime conditions. After testing a condition that decides the next kernel to be executed, its corresponding configurations and input data should be loaded into the on-chip memory before its execution starts, producing a computation stall. Our configuration scheduler minimizes these computation stalls and reduces the application´s latency by loading configurations before they are needed. Experimental results obtained for interactive and synthetic applications meet their real-time constraints.