The Molen Media Processor: Design and Evaluation

Automatic hardware generation for the Molen reconfigurable architecture: a G721 case study

The advantages of the reconfigurable technology in terms of performance have been widely recognized. However, programming reconfigurable systems and designing hardware accelerators for them is not a trivial task. The Molen paradigm provides an easy to use approach to couple a General Purpose Processor (GPP) with custom designed reconfigurable accelerators both at program level and at hardware d...

The Molen Polymorphic Media Processor van / by

The Virtex II ProTM MOLEN Processor

We use the Xilinx Virtex II ProTM technology as prototyping platform to design a MOLEN polymorphic processor, a custom computing machine based on the co-processor architectural paradigm. The PowerPC embedded in the FPGA is operating as a general purpose (core) processor and the reconfigurable fabric is used as a reconfigurable co-processor. The paper focuses on hardware synthesis results and ex...

Matrix Multiplication Implementation in the MOLEN Polymorphic Processor

Floating-point matrix multiplication is arguably the most important kernel routine in many scientific applications. Therefore, its efficient implementation is crucial for the overall performance of any computer system targeting scientific computations. In this paper, we propose a holistic solution to accelerate matrix multiplication on reconfigurable hardware using the MOLEN polymorphic process...

Supporting the Linux Operating System on the MOLEN Processor Prototype

In order to support an operating system on the MOLEN processor prototype, there is a need to increase the size of the memory the prototype can support. In this paper, we present an OCM-based shared DDR memory controller that can achieve an improvement from 6% (best-case) to 13% (worst-case) over a PLB based design. Subsequently, we explain the steps needed to execute Linux on the previously des...