%0 Journal Article
%A Clemente Barreira, Juan Antonio
%A Resano, Javier
%A González Calvo, Carlos
%A Mozos Muñoz, Daniel
%T A Hardware Implementation of a Run-Time Scheduler for Reconfigurable Systems
%D 2011
%@ 1063-8210
%U https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/45146
%X New generation embedded systems demand high performance, efficiency and flexibility. Reconfigurable hardware can provide all these features. However the costly reconfiguration process and the lack of management support have prevented a broader use of these resources. To solve these issues we have developed a scheduler that deals with task-graphs at run-time, steering its execution in the reconfigurable resources while carrying out both prefetch and replacement techniques that cooperate to hide most of the reconfiguration delays. In our scheduling environment task-graphs are analyzed at design-time to extract useful information. This information is used at run-time to obtain near-optimal schedules, escaping from local-optimum decisions, while only carrying out simple computations.Moreover, we have developed a hardware implementation of the scheduler that applies all the optimization techniques while introducing a delay of only a few clock cycles. In the experiments our scheduler clearly outperforms conventional run-time schedulers based on As-Soon-As-Possible techniques. In addition, our replacement policy, specially designed for reconfigurable systems, achieves almost optimal results both regarding reuse and performance.
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