Online scheduling for multi-core shared reconfigurable fabric

Abstract

Processor customization in the form of application-specific instructions has become a popular choice to meet the increasing performance demands of embedded applications under short time-to-market constraints. Implementing the custom instructions in reconfigurable logic provides greater flexibility. Recently, a number of architectures have been proposed where multiple cores on chip share a single reconfigurable fabric that implements the custom instructions. Effective exploitation of this reconfigurable fabric requires runtime scheduling of the tasks on the cores and allocation of reconfigurable logic for custom instructions. In this paper, we propose an efficient online scheduling algorithm for multi-core shared reconfigurable fabric and show its effectiveness through experimental evaluation. © 2012 EDAA.