An Embrace-and-Extend Approach to Managing the Complexity of Future Heterogeneous Systems

In this paper, we present a particularly lightweight, integrative approach to programming and executing applications targeting heterogeneous, dynamically reconfigurable parallel systems. Based on an analysis of existing approaches, we strictly focused on compatibility and lightweightedness. Our approach therefore follows an embrace-and-extend strategy and achieves desired functionality by adopting and augmenting existing system services, achieving the desired properties. We implemented this concept using the Linux OS and demonstrated its suitability with a heterogeneous platform comprising IA32 multicore processors and current FPGA accelerator hardware using state-of-the-art HyperTransport interconnection technology.