3D compaction: A novel blocking-aware algorithm for online hardware task scheduling and placement on 2D partially reconfigurable devices

Abstract

Few of the benefits of exploiting partially reconfigurable devices are power consumption reduction, cost reduction, and customized performance improvement. To obtain these benefits, one main problem needs to be solved is the task scheduling and placement. Existing algorithms tend to allocate tasks at positions where can block future tasks to be scheduled earlier denoted as "blocking-effect". To tackle this effect, a novel 3D total contiguous surface (3DTCS) heuristic is proposed for equipping our scheduling and placement algorithm with blocking-awareness. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with both synthetic and real workloads (e.g. MDTC, matrix multiplication, hamming code, sorting, FIR, ADPCM, etc). The proposed algorithm not only has better scheduling and placement quality but also has shorter algorithm execution time compared to existing algorithms. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.