Reconfigurable Meshes : Theory and Practice 1

Configurable computing has recently gained much attention with the promise of delivering an order of magnitude performance improvement over general purpose processors. In this paper we contrast the abstract models of reconfigurable architectures and actual hardware available for configurable computing systems. There is a wealth of ideas related to abstract models of reconfigurable architectures and fast parallel algorithms which exploit the reconfiguration potential in non-trivial ways. We summarize these abstract models and illustrate the power of these models using several example algorithms. We identify the practical problems in implementing these models in VLSI and describe some prototype implementations. Commercial FPGA devices which are being touted as the solution for building configurable computing systems are also examined. The MAARC project at USC endeavors to bridge this gap between the abstract and the real worlds. This work was supported by DARPA under contract DABT63-96-C-0049 monitored by Fort Hauchuca. Models, Algorithms and Architectures for Reconfigurable Computing, http://maarc.usc.edu