Practical design of a computation and energy efficient hardware task scheduler in embedded reconfigurable computing systems

By utilizing massively parallel circuit design in FPGAs, the overall system efficiency, in terms of computation efficiency and energy efficiency, can be greatly enhanced by offloading some computation-intensive tasks which are originally executed in the instruction set processor to the FPGA fabric. In essence, a hardware task scheduler is needed. However, most of the work in the literature considers scheduling algorithms which are unable or difficult to be implemented using the design flows in current development platform. Moreover, little of the work takes energy consumption into consideration. In this paper, we present the design of a hardware task scheduler which takes energy consumption into consideration, and can be readily implemented using current design flows.