Seamless hardware-software integration in reconfigurable computing systems

Ideally, reconfigurable-system programmers and designers should code algorithms and write hardware accelerators independently of the underlying platform. To realize this scenario, the authors propose a portable, hardware-agnostic programming paradigm, which delegates platform-specific tasks to a system-level virtualization layer. This layer supports a chosen programming model and hides platform details from users much as general-purpose computers do. We introduce multithreaded programming model for reconfigurable computing based on a unified virtual-memory image for both software and hardware application parts. We also address the challenge of achieving seamless hardware-software interfacing and portability with minimal performance penalties.