USURP: A Standard for Design Portability in Reconfigurable Computing

Abstract—The proprietary nature of FPGA platforms has been a hin-drance to developer and user productivity since the inception of recon-figurable computing. Numerous solutions such as high-level languages, intelligent compilers, and run-time schedulers have had varying success at boosting efficiency by creating standardized methods for accessing and controlling hardware resources. However, significantly less attention has been given to compile-time unification efforts which create design portabil-ity by wrapping FPGA resources and exposing them in a standardized fash-ion. By normalizing software APIs and hardware interconnections under the USURP framework, application developers can focus exclusively on the intended algorithm. End users can concentrate on control flow with little or no required knowledge of underlying hardware or scheduling mechanisms. The increased productivity of such a standardized framework will be criti-cal for continued success in application development for high-performance reconfigurable systems. Index Terms—reconfigurable computing, FPGA compile-time tools, FPGA run-time services, hardware-accelerated applications, HPC, CARMA, USURP I