High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing

Abstract

High-performance reconfigurable computing systems integrate reconfigurable technology in the computing architecture to improve performance. Besides performance, reconfigurable hardware devices also achieve lower power consumption compared to general-purpose processors. Better performance and lower power consumption could be achieved using application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology. However, ASICs are not reconfigurable, turning them application specific. Reconfigurable logic becomes a major advantage when hardware flexibility permits to speed up whatever the application with the same hardware module. The first and most common devices utilized for reconfigurable computing are fine-grained FPGAs with a large hardware flexibility. To reduce the performance and area overhead associated with the reconfigurability, coarse-grained reconfigurable solutions has been proposed as a way to achieve better performance and lower power consumption. In this chapter, the authors provide a description of reconfigurable hardware for high-performance computing.