A low fragmentation heuristic for task placement in 2D RTR HW management

Abstract

A novel technique is proposed for the management of a two-dimensional run-time reconfigurable device in order to get true hardware multitasking. The proposed technique uses a Vertex List Set to keep track of the available free area, and of the candidate locations to place the arriving tasks. Each Vertex List describes the contour of each unoccupied area fragment in the reconfigurable device. Several heuristics are proposed to solve the problem of selecting one of the vertices to place the task. The heuristic that gives best results is based on a novel fragmentation metric. This metric estimates for each alternative location the suitability of the resulting free device area to accept future incoming tasks. Finally, we show that our approach, with a reasonable complexity, gives better results, in terms of device fragmentation and efficiency, than other techniques. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.