Virtual area management: Multitasking on dynamically partially reconfigurable devices

Every year the computing resources available on dynamically partially reconfigurable devices increase enormously. In the near future, we expect many applications to run on a single reconfigurable device. In this paper, we present a concept for multitasking on dynamically partially reconfigurable systems called virtual area management. We explain its advantages, show its challenges, and discuss possible solutions. Furthermore, we investigate one problem in more detail: Packing modules with time-varying resource requests. This problem from the reconfigurable computing field results in a completely new optimization problem not tackled before. ILP-based and heuristic approaches are compared in an experimental study and the drawbacks and benefits discussed.