Dynamic reconfiguration to support concurrent applications

This paper describes the development of a dynamically reconfigurable system that can support multiple applications running concurrently. A dynamically reconfigurable system allows hardware reconfiguration while part of the re configurable hardware is busy computing. An FPGA resource manager (RM) is d eveloped to allocate and de-allocate FPGA resources and to preload FPGA con figuration files. For each individual application. different tasks that req uire FPGA resources are represented as a flow graph which is made available to the RM so as to enable efficient resource management and preloading. Th e performance of using the RM to support several applications is summarized . The impact of supporting concurrency and preloading in reducing applicati on execution time is demonstrated.