Writing Portable Applications that Dynamically Bind at Run Time to Reconfigurable Hardware

Abstract

Powerful multicomputer platforms that combine FPGAs and programmable processors promise tremendous performance benefits for applications that take advantage of these rapidly emerging architectures. Portable applications are desirable because they can be easily adapted to take advantage of different reconfigurable computing platforms. raditional practices, however, intertwine application code with hardware specific code such that porting entails a significant rewrite of the application and reuse is difficult. Vforce, based on the VSIPL++ standard, is an exten sible framework we created that allows the same application code to run on different reconfigurable computing platforms. Vforce offers application-level portability, framework-level extensibility to new hardware, and system-level run time resource management. In particular, Vforce supports very late binding of the application to a specific hardware platform such that binding does not occur until run time. This paper describes Vforce with a focus on late run time binding to a specific hardware platform. Results using Vforce to implement an FFT and a time domain adaptive beam- former are presented.