Hardware/software integration in solar polarimetry

A polarimetry system for solar astronomy is presented. The system is based on a reconfigurable coprocessor attached to a conventional workstation. Although the computationally intensive parts of the application are performed in the host processor the reconfigurable coprocessor plays a key role in taking charge of tasks that the host performs poorly, such as cycle-by-cycle data marshalling and real-time synchronization. The runtime environment supporting the reconfigurable coprocessor makes it easy to experiment with different implementation tradeoffs and postpone the final partitioning of functionality between the host and reconfigurable coprocessor until quite late in the design process.