SPREAD: A Streaming-Based Partially Reconfigurable Architecture and Programming Model

Abstract — Partially reconfigurable systems are promising com-puting platforms for streaming applications, which demand both hardware efficiency and reconfigurable flexibility. To realize the full potential of these systems, a streaming-based partially reconfigurable architecture and unified software/hardware mul-tithreaded programming model (SPREAD) is presented in this paper. SPREAD is a reconfigurable architecture with a unified software/hardware thread interface and high throughput point-to-point streaming structure. It supports dynamic computing resource allocation, runtime software/hardware switching, and streaming-based multithreaded management at the operating system level. SPREAD is designed to provide programmers of streaming applications with a unified view of threads, allowing them to exploit thread, data, and pipeline parallelism; it enhances hardware efficiency while simplifying the development of stream-ing applications for partially reconfigurable systems. Experi-mental results targeting cryptography applications demonstrate the feasibility and superior performance of SPREAD. Moreover