Prototyping Dynamic Task Migration on Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Systems

Reconfigurable devices, such as FPGAs, have been known to offer an excellent performance and a high efficiency in computation. Due to their improving capacity and more efficient architecture recently, there are growing interests in using FPGAs as coprocessors in reconfigurable systems. However, FPGAs still lack the support in dynamic scheduling, e.g. to manage multiple tasks or users in a system. Performing runtime task relocation or load distribution is not possible unless the reconfigurable system supports dynamic task migration. Such ability requires the automation of configuration and context management in reconfigurable architecture, which is not available in the existing solutions. In this paper, we propose a framework for prototyping dynamic task migration between heterogeneous FPGAs. A task running on one FPGA can be suspended and resumed on another FPGA with different architecture. The extraction and restoration of FPGA registers and memory values are possible due to the task-specific extraction mechanism provided by the tasks. The proposed framework exploits a high-performance embedded processor tightly-coupled to an FPGA to automatically manage the configuration and context. It utilizes two popular heterogeneous reconfigurable systems in the implementation, Xilinx Zynq ZC706 and Altera Arria V SoC. Tests are performed using graphical and non-graphical benchmark applications and performance results are presented.