RTASS: a RunTime Adaptable and Scalable System for Network-on-Chip-Based Architectures

In an ever-evolving digital world with complex algorithms like machine learning, we need new strategies for more flexibility to cope with the ever-changing environment. For this, runtime scalability and runtime adaptability for low-power and highly efficient hardware is a promising solution. By combining the runtime reconfiguration of FPGAs with the efficient communication of Networks-on-Chip (NoC), we are able to implement a highly scalable, high-performance, and energy-efficient computing architecture that fixed-function units and specialized static accelerators lack. In this work, we introduce a RunTime Adaptable and Scalable System for NoC-based architectures called RTASS. The hardware architecture includes a master subsystem, a network adapter, and an NoC subsystem with parametrizable routers and several various routing algorithms. Furthermore, RTASS provides a software architecture that includes advanced drivers for runtime management. The key benefit of RTASS is the ability to dynamically adjust the number of routers within the NoC at runtime based on the current application's requirements. That allows the system to support both homogeneous and inhomogeneous types of processing elements as well as regular and irregular shapes. The development of this runtime scalable and flexible architecture will establish the foundation for future highly adaptable applications such as machine learning and computer vision in the embedded computing field. We implemented and evaluated the proposed work with the Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA, with the possibility of porting it to other FPGAs that support runtime reconfiguration.