A Portable Memory Access Framework on Reconfigurable Computers

Current reconfigurable computers (RCs) do not share a unified architectural model, which presents a challenge to any developer who intends to port hardware designs across different RC platforms. In this paper, we propose a portable memory access framework that gives the user a unified memory view combining the host memory and the local memory of FPGA. Three memory access modes are provided, and the hardware cost and performance impact have been measured on three major RCs: SRC-6, SGI RC-100 and Cray XD1. Under current implementation, the penalty to hardware resource utilization and performance of applying this framework is reduced to minimum.