Fast online placement for reconfigurable computing systems

Advances in programmable hardware have lead to new architectures where the hardware can be dynamically adapted to the application to gain better performance. There are still many challenging problems to be solved before any practical general-purpose reconfigurable system is built. One fundamental issue is the placement of the modules on the reconfigurable functional unit (RFU). In this paper we present an online heuristic placement method with overall O(n log n) space complexity and O(log n) time complexity for each insertion/deletion of modules on the RFU chip, n being the number of modules currently on the RFU. Our proposed method is O(n) faster than an algorithm which considers all possible locations for placing a new module, but as experimental results show its quality is 7% worse.