cfaed Publications

@article{SAHOO2018,
title = "Multi-objective design space exploration for system partitioning of FPGA-based Dynamic Partially Reconfigurable Systems",
journal = "Integration",
year = "2018",
month={November},
issn = "0167-9260",
doi = "https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vlsi.2018.10.006",
url = "http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167926018302608",
author = "S.S. Sahoo and T.D.A. Nguyen and B. Veeravalli and A. Kumar",
keywords = "Dynamic partial reconfiguration, Field programmable gate arrays, Lifetime-aware scheduling, Task-graphs, Reliability, Heterogeneous systems, Real-time systems",
abstract = "Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) enables resource sharing in FPGA-based systems. It can also be used for the mitigation of aging-related permanent faults by increasing the number of redundant Partially Reconfigurable Regions (PRRs). Normally, these PRRs are able to host any of the Partially Reconfigurable Modules (PRMs), or tasks, at one particular instance. This kind of system is called homogeneous. However, the FPGA resource constraints limit the amount of homogeneous redundancy that can be used and hence affect the lifetime of the system. This issue can be addressed by utilizing the heterogeneous approach where each PRR now only hosts a subset of the tasks. Further, the deadlines of the applications must also be taken care of in the design phase to decide the mapping and scheduling of tasks to PRRs. To this end, we propose an application-specific multi-objective system-level design methodology to determine the appropriate number of PRRs and the mapping and scheduling of tasks to the PRRs. Specifically, we propose a lifetime-aware scheduling method that maximizes the system's mean time to failure (MTTF) with different tolerances in the makespan specification of an application. We use the scheduler along with an automated floorplanner for design space exploration at design-time to generate a feasible heterogeneous PRR-based system. Our experiments show that the heterogeneous systems can offer more than 2x lifetime improvement over homogeneous ones. It also offers better scaling with increased tolerance in makespan specification."
}