Resource Partitioning and Application Scheduling with Module Merging on Dynamically and Partially Reconfigurable FPGAs

Abstract

Dynamically partially reconfigurable (DPR) technology based on FPGA is applied extensively in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) because of its advantages in processing efficiency and power consumption. To make full use of the advantages of DPR in execution efficiency, we build a DPR system model that meets to the actual application requirements and the objective constraints. According to the consistency of reconfiguration order and dependencies, we propose two algorithms based on simulated annealing (SA). The algorithms partition FPGA resource to several regions and schedule tasks to the regions. In order to improve the performance of the algorithms, we exploit the module merging technology to improve the parallelism of task execution and design a new solution generation method to speed up the convergence speed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms have a lower time complexity than mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), iterative scheduler (IS) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). For applications with more tasks, the proposed algorithms show performance advantages in producing better partitioning and scheduling results in a shorter time.