Partitioning Hardware and Software for Reconfigurable Supercomputing Applications: A Case Study

Often reconfigurable systems are reported to have 10× to 100× speedup over that of a software system. However, the reconfigurable hardware must usually be combined with software to form an entire system. This system integration presents a hardware/software co-design problem with many system engineering issues. Here, we present traffic acceleration on the Cray XD1 supercomputer and describe the costs involved in different hardware/software trade-offs.