Kernel scheduling techniques for efficient solution space exploration in reconfigurable computing

Run-time reconfigurable systems have emerged as a flexible way of facing wi th a single device a wide range of applications. The adequate exploitation of the available hardware resources requires the development of design tool s that support the design process. Task scheduling becomes a very critical issue in achieving the high performance that DSP and multimedia application s demand. This paper addresses task scheduling in reconfigurable computing for these kinds of applications. First, we discuss the main issues involved in the problem. Then, we propose a new methodology with some bounding and pruning techniques in order to produce an efficient exploration of the desi gn space. This work has been developed for Morphosys, a coarse-grain multi- context reconfigurable architecture, and it can be successfully applied to systems with similar features. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights re served.