Runtime Multitasking Support on Reconfigurable Accelerators

Serving several applications at runtime on a reconfigurable machine is a challenging problem in which the reconfigurable fabric has to be shared among competing tasks. Due to the inherent complexity of assigning tasks to the FPGA, a comprehensive runtime system is required to address all the conflicting issues between competing applications’ demands and to keep the system performance at the required level. In this paper, we present a runtime environment wherein a number of components introduced to handle the task assignment problem in a very low overhead fashion. We present the details of each component and evaluate the overhead imposed by each.