Adaptive resource management for simultaneous multitasking in mixed-grained reconfigurable multi-core processors

We propose a novel scheme for run-time management of mixed-grained reconfigurable fabric for the purpose of simultaneous multi-tasking in multi-core reconfigurable processors. Traditionally, reconfigurable fabrics are allocated to distinct tasks in order to improve the overall performance without considering quality of service of the entire application (e.g. 30 fps in video conferencing application). We employ a new concept of task criticality that is based on performance constraints of each task at functional block level. Our scheme significantly reduces the number of deadline misses by dynamically evaluating the criticality of each task and performing an efficient load balancing of a mixed-grained reconfigurable fabric at run-time. We use a comprehensive video conferencing application as a benchmark to evaluate our scheme. Compared to the state-of-the-art our scheme reduces the number of deadline misses by 6× (on average) and improves the performance by 1.3× (on average).