A portable memory access framework on reconfigurable computers

Current Reconfigurable Computers (RCs) do not share a unified architectural model, which presents a challenge to any developer who intends to port hardware designs across different RC platforms. In this paper, we propose a portable memory access framework that gives the user a unified memory view combining the host memory and the lo-cal memory of FPGA. Three memory access modes are pro-vided, and the hardware cost and performance impact have been measured on three major RCs: SRC-6, SGI RC-100 and Cray XD1. Under current implementation, the penalty to hardware resource utilization and performance of apply-ing this framework is reduced to minimum. 1