An Enhanced Static-List Scheduling Algorithm for Temporal Partitioning onto RPUs.pdf

1 In Proc. of the IFIP TC10 WG10.5 X International Conference on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI99), Lisbon, December 1-3, 1999 (Session: High-level Synthesis and Verification of Embedded Systems). VLSI: Systems on a Chip, Luis M: Silveira, Srinivas Devadas and Ricardo Reis (Editors), Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 485-496. An Enhanced Static-List Scheduling Algorithm for Temporal Partitioning onto RPUs Jo?o M. P. Cardoso and Horácio C. Neto jmpc@, hcn@inesc.pt University of Algarve/INESC, IST/INESC Key words: Temporal Partitioning, Reconfigurable Computing, Dynamic Reconfiguration, Field-Programmable Gate-Arrays (FPGAs) Abstract: This paper presents a novel algorithm for temporal partitioning of graphs rep- resenting a behavioral description. The algorithm is based on an extension of the traditional static-list scheduling that tailors it to resolve both scheduling and temporal partitioning. The nodes to be mapped into a partition are selected based on a statically computed cost model. The cost for each node integrates communication effects, the critical path length, and the possibility of the criti- cal path to hide the delay of parallel nodes. In order to alleviate the runtime there is no dynamic update of the costs. A comparison of the algorithm to other schedulers and with close-to-optimum results obtained with a simulated annealing approach is shown. The presented algorithm has been implemented and the results show that it is robust, effective, and efficient, and when com- pared to other methods finds very good results in small amounts of CPU time. 1. INTRODUCTION The availability of RPUs (reconfigurable processing units), such as the new FPGAs, with lower reconfigurable times and partial-reconfiguration ca- pability, has made possible the concept of “virtual hardware” [1]: the hard- ware resources are supposed unlimited and implementations that oversize the RPU area are resolved by temporal partitioning. Then, the partitioned