Design For Agility: A Modular Reconfigurable Platform for Heterogeneous Many-Core Architectures

Reconfigurable many-core computing platforms are gaining increasing attention for cloud and edge computing because of their high degree of scalability as well as flexibility. Heterogeneous many-core architectures provide more computing capabilities for domain-specific and general-purpose applications. However, bringing heterogeneous and custom computing elements together increases on-chip communication and run-time management complexities. This leads to growing design time and development cost, in addition to lack of platform re-usability. The scope of this PhD work is the design of a modifiable and modular hardware platform that provides a high degree of agility to change types or specifications of computing elements at design and run-time to achieve the best performance for different application demands using the same platform components. Different acceleration strategies and memory hierarchies are supported. In this paper, the proposed platform, preliminary results, and evaluation are presented targeting FPGAs. Finally, planned and future works are highlighted.