Configuration prefetching techniques for partial reconfigurable coprocessor with relocation and defragmentation.

One of the major overheads for reconfigurable computing is the time it takes to reconfigure the devices in the system. This overhead limits the speedup possible in this paradigm. In this paper we explore configuration prefetching techniques for reducing this overhead. By overlapping the configuration loadings with the computation on the host processor the reconfiguration overhead can be reduced. Our prefetching techniques target to the reconfigurable systems containing a Partial Reconfigurable FPGA with Relocation + Defragmentation (R+D model) since the R+D FPGA showed high hardware utilization. We have investigated various techniques including static configuration prefetching, dynamic configuration pre-fetching, and hybrid prefetching. We have developed prefetching algorithms that significantly reduce the reconfiguration overhead.