Portable Library Development for Reconfigurable Computing Systems

As Reconfigurable Computing (RC) systems become more common place among application scientists and developers, a mechanism for porting existing work to other platforms is increasingly desirable. The constantly changing technologies and architectures in today’s RC platforms present a challenge to any developer wishing to move from an early development system to a newer system. Many new RC systems do not offer a complete development environment, and often requires the end user to choose design tools, languages, and hardware library packages that are compatible with their system. Rewriting basic cores for each platform can be a daunting task. Unlike the High Performance Parallel Computing community, which provides highly optimized and portable open source libraries to its community, to the best of our knowledge such an effort does not exist for the RC community. In this work we propose a methodology for developing RC libraries and present the challenges involved in each step. This paper also presents work done in developing an extensive portable library using the SRC6, Cray XD1, and SGI RC100 platforms as a case study.