Managing a reconfigurable processor in a general purpose workstation environment

This dissertation considers the problems associated with using Field Programmable Logic (FPL) within a processor to accelerate applications in the context of a general purpose workstation, where this scarce resource will need to be shared fairly and securely by the operating system between a dynamic set of competing applications with no prior knowledge of their resource usage requirements. A solution for these problems is proposed in the Proteus System, which describes a suitable set of operating system mechanisms, with appropriate hardware support, to allow the FPL resource to be virtualised and managed suitably without applications having to be aware of how the resource is allocated. We also describe a suitable programming model that would allow applications to be built with traditional techniques incorporating custom instructions. We demonstrate the practicability of this system by simulating an ARM processor extended with a suitably structured FPL resource, upon which we run multiple applications that make use of one or more blocks of FPL, all of which are managed by a custom operating system kernel. We demonstrate that applications maintain a performance gain despite having to share the FPL resource between other applications. This dissertation concludes that it is possible for an operating system to manage a reconfigurable processor within the context of a workstation environment, provided suitable hardware support, without negating the benefit of having the FPL resource, even during times of high load. It also concludes that the integration of custom hardware associated with applications into the system is manageable within existing programming techniques.