CAREER: Design Virtualization for Mainstream Programming of Reconfigurable Computers

尽管可重构计算（RC）设备已经被广泛地示出与其他计算设备相比具有显著的性能和功率优势，但是由于由非主流高级综合、复杂的低级调试、通常需要数小时或数天的冗长编译时间、缺乏代码可移植性、过高的设备成本以及其他挑战。 为了解决这些问题，本研究引入RC虚拟化，以减少高层次的应用程序和物理RC设备之间的语义差距与成千上万的细粒度资源。鉴于物理RC设备必须是细粒度的，以实现灵活性和成本效益，所提出的虚拟RC设备，实现在这样的物理设备之上，可以专门用于不同的应用领域的需要，以隐藏物理设备的复杂性。因此，建议的虚拟化支持快速RC编译，可以在几秒钟内完成，而不是几小时。快速RC编译反过来支持主流的调试设计方法。虚拟化还实现了跨物理RC设备的应用程序可移植性，类似于虚拟机实现可移植软件代码的方式，此外还实现了工具可移植性，使第三方工具能够针对任何RC系统。最后，通过将虚拟化与来自用于异构加速器的标准化并行语言的高级合成相结合（例如，OpenCL），本研究通过启用其他主流计算设备使用的设计流程来启用主流RC使用。

Although reconfigurable computing (RC) devices have been widely shown to have significant performance and power advantages compared to other computing devices, mainstream usage of such devices has been resisted due to increased application design complexity caused by non-mainstream high-level synthesis, complex low-level debugging, lengthy compilation times often requiring hours or days, a lack of code portability, prohibitive device costs, among other challenges. To address these problems, this study introduces RC virtualization to reduce the semantic gap between high-level applications and physical RC devices with hundreds of thousands of fine-grained resources. Whereas physical RC devices must be fine grained for flexibility and cost effectiveness, the proposed virtual RC devices, which are implemented atop such physical devices, can be specialized to the needs of different application domains to hide physical device complexity. As a result, the proposed virtualization enables rapid RC compilation that can complete in seconds as opposed to hours. Rapid RC compilation in turn enables mainstream design methodologies for debugging. Virtualization also enables application portability across physical RC devices, similar to how virtual machines achieve portable software code, in addition to tool portability that enables third-party tools to target any RC system. Finally, by combining virtualization with high-level synthesis from standardized parallel languages for heterogeneous accelerators (e.g., OpenCL), this study enables mainstream RC usage by enabling the design flow used by other mainstream computing devices.