Managing a reconfigurable processor in a general purpose workstation environment

Abstract

Reconfigurable processor hybrids are becoming an accepted solution in the embedded systems domain, but have yet to gain acceptance in the general purpose workstation domain. One problem with current solutions is their lack of support for the dynamic workloads and resource demands of a general purpose workstation. In this paper we describe and demonstrate a reconfigurable processor architecture that lets the operating system dynamically share the Field Programmable Logic (FPL) resource between a set of applications without the management overheads negating the benefit of having the extra resource.