An efficient algorithm for online soft real-time task placement on reconfigurable hardware devices

Reconfigurable devices such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are very popular in today's embedded systems design due to their low-cost, high-performance and flexibility. Partially Runtime-Reconfigurable (PRTR) FPGAs allow hardware tasks to be placed and removed dynamically at runtime. Hardware task scheduling on PRTR FPGAs brings many challenging issues to traditional real-time scheduling theory, which have not been adequately addressed by the real-time research community compared to software task scheduling on CPUs. In this paper, we present an efficient online task placement algorithm for minimizing fragmentation on PRTR FPGAs. First, we present a novel 2D area fragmentation metric that takes into account probability distribution of sizes of future task arrivals; second, we take into the time axis to obtain a 3D fragmentation metric. Simulation experiments indicate that our techniques result in low ratio of task rejection and high FPGA utilization compared to existing techniques. © 2007 IEEE