Hthreads: A Computational Model for Reconfigurable Devices

Recent architectural advancements in reconfigurable devices have exposed the ability to support massive parallelism inside of small, low-cost, embedded devices. The massive parallelism inside of these reconfigurable devices has promised to bring an unprecedented level of performance to the embedded systems domain. However, the complexity of programming these reconfigurable devices is daunting - too daunting for the average programmer. This paper presents Hthreads. Hthreads is a computational architecture which aims to bridge the gap between regular programmers and powerful but complex reconfigurable devices. Hthreads accomplishes this goal using three layers of abstraction built upon standard reconfigurable devices: an operating system capable of supporting a diverse collection of computational models within a reconfigurable device, an intermediate form representation which eases the development of applications on reconfigurable devices, and support for high level languages which are familiar to most programmers