Slides available here!

Speaker:

Frederic Rousseau, TIMA, France

Title:

Efficient Hardware Context-Switch for Task Migration between Heterogeneous FPGA

Abstract:

Modern FPGAs can provide great computational power and flexibility. Nevertheless, multi-user approaches are particularly underdeveloped because they require specific mechanisms still to be automated. Indeed, sharing an FPGA resource between several applications or users requires an ability known as context switch. The latter enables starting, pausing and resuming applications at system demand.

We present a method that automatically selects the best execution point, called hardware checkpoint, to perform a context switch on a reconfigurable resource. The method relies on a static analysis of the finite state machine of a circuit to select the checkpoint states. The obtained selection ensures that the context switch mechanism will respect the latency demanded by the system and tries to minimize various overheads. The method takes advantage of its integration in an open-source high-level synthesis tool. Results on a typical benchmark highlight its efficiency; especially this method has been used to implement hardware task migration between FPGA from different families.

Bio:

Pr Frederic Rousseau received the Engineer degree in computer science and electrical engineering from the University of Grenoble in 1991 and a Ph.D. in computer science in 1997 from the University of Evry - France. He has hold an assistant professor position at the University of Grenoble since October 1999 and a professor position since 2007. He is researcher in TIMA lab. His research interest concerns Systems-on-Chip design and architecture, prototyping of hardware/software systems, including reconfigurable systems and high-level synthesis for embedded systems.



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