Supporting Dynamic Control-Flow Execution for Runtime Reconfigurable Processors

Abstract: As the need for more computing power grows, traditional methods are hitting limits. To boost performance, we're expanding Central Processing Unit (CPU) capabilities and using specialized hardware accelerators. For example, mobile devices usually have cameras, video encoding, and audio accelerators. To perform the different tasks, these accelerators execute microcode programs. These accelerators, however, take up space and often sit idle. Reconfigurable processors offer a solution. They have a normal core connected to several accelerator slots. These accelerator slots can be filled during runtime to accommodate the application running. Once one application finishes and another application is running, the accelerators can be switched. For example, playing music after using the camera. In this work, we introduce dynamic control-flow execution for the microcode of runtime reconfigurable processors, i.e., support for loops, conditional jumps, and exception handling. We benchmark using four different applications from four domains (object detection, ocean movement simulation, artificial intelligence and security) that all are compute-intensive and would require the dynamic control-flow when executed on reconfigurable processors. We show that the dynamic control-flow allows different applications to be executed with significant speedup in comparison with execution on general-purpose processors.