Accelerating thread-intensive and explicit memory management programs with dynamic partial reconfiguration

Recent research has shown that field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have a large potential for accelerating demanding applications, such as high performance digital signal process applications with low-volume market. The loss of generality in the architecture is one disadvantage of using FPGAs, however, the reconfigurability of FPGAs allow reprogramming for other applications. Therefore, a uniform FPGA-based architecture, an efficient programming model, and a simple mapping method are paramount for the wide acceptance of FPGA technology. This paper presents MASALA, a dynamically reconfigurable FPGA-based accelerator for parallel programs written in thread-intensive and explicit memory management (TEMM) programming models. Our system uses a TEMM programming model to parallelize demanding applications, including application decomposition into separate thread blocks and compute and data load/store decoupling. Hardware engines are included into MASALA using partial dynamic reconfiguration modules, each of which encapsulates a thread process engine that implements the hardware’s thread functionality. A data dispatching scheme is also included in MASALA to enable the explicit communication of multiple memory hierarchies such as interhardware engines, host processors, and hardware engines. Finally, this paper illustrates a multi-FPGA prototype system of the presented architecture: MASALA-SX. A large synthetic aperture radar image formatting experiment shows that MASALA’s architecture facilitates the construction of a TEMM program accelerator by providing greater performance and less power consumption than current CPU platforms, without sacrificing programmability, flexibility, and scalability.