NGS: Software Innovations for Liquid Architectures

Washington University, Saint Louis MO

Investigators

Abstract

TITLE: Software Innovations for Liquid Architectures We propose to bring the advantages of custom logic to low-volume but high-performance applications by semiautomatically generating custom logic, deployed in reconfigurable logic. By coupling (hard-or soft-core) commodity processors with reconfigurable logic, an application is essentially offered a liquid architecture, where the definition and implementation of the computer's instruction set, its coprocessors' functionality, and its supporting structures can be easily changed. These architectural changes can improve performance by supplying instructions and efficient implementations for frequently occurring operations, by changing the size or policies of caches and other supporting structures, and by dynamically exchanging speed for power-savings where required. With proper software support, liquid architectures can improve the performance of many kinds of applications, ranging from high-performance, scientific calculations to low-power, embedded systems. Our research aims to develop the software infrastructure and methodologies needed to facilitate execution of applications on liquid architectures, addressing the following issues: