Tech notes by Michael Winston Dales

Reconfigurable processors, which combine run time programmable hardware and microprocessors on the same chip, are becoming popular in the embedded systems domain. They allow application specific logic to be loaded onto the processor and then controlled from software. Such an ability could be useful for accelerating applications on a workstation. However, integrating such a device into a workstation environment is not a straight forward task. The reconfigurable hardware resource on such a device would need to be shared easily, fairly, and securely, which will require changes at the hardware, operating system, and programming environment level. In this paper we outline the problems that need to be overcome when managing this new resource, and how we plan to solve them.