Research Issues in Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Computing

As the number of system gates available on reconfigurable platforms increase beyond 20 million, the issue of the management of these resources and their sharing among may applications and users will become more of a concern. In this paper we describe the research issues for managing these resources in an operating system for a reconfigurable computer. We also detail a feasible set of components for the operating system and a feasible software architecture We show there is no current operating system implementation with these components. We propose a number of performance metrics which we believe are important measures of the quality of an operating system implementation. These include fragmentation of area, algorithm performance and application performance. We complete the paper with a status report on our implementation of an operating system for a reconfigurable computer.