Executing Hardware Tasks on Dynamically Reconfigurable Devices Under Real-Time Conditions

This paper presents a prototype system that executes a set of periodic real-time tasks utilizing dynamic hardware reconfiguration. The proposed scheduling technique, MSDL, is not only able to give an offline guarantee for the feasibility of the task set but also minimizes the number of device configurations. After describing this technique, we extend the schedulability analysis to include different runtime system overheads, including the device reconfiguration time. Then we detail a light-weight runtime system that performs the online part of the MSDL scheduling technique. The runtime system is entirely implemented in hardware. Finally, we outline the corresponding synthesis tool flow and report on the overhead posed by the runtime system