High Performance Reconfigurable Computing Systems

The rapid progress and advancement in electronic chips technology provide a variety of new implementation options for system engineers. The choice varies between the flexible programs running on a general-purpose processor (GPP) and the fixed hardware implementation using an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). Many other implementation options present, for instance, a system with a RISC processor and a DSP core. Other options include graphics processors and microcontrollers. Specialist processors certainly improve performance over general-purpose ones, but this comes as a quid pro quo for flexibility. Combining the flexibility of GPPs and the high performance of ASICs leads to the introduction of reconfigurable computing (RC) as a new implementation option with a balance between versatility and speed. The focus of this chapter is on introducing reconfigurable computers as modern super computing architectures. The chapter also investigates the main reasons behind the current advancement in the development of RC-systems. Furthermore, a technical survey of various RC-systems is included laying common grounds for comparisons. In addition, this chapter mainly presents case studies implemented under the MorphoSys RC-system. The selected case studies belong to different areas of application, such as, computer graphics and information coding. Parallel versions of the studied algorithms are developed to match the topologies supported by the MorphoSys. Performance evaluation and results analyses are included for implementations with different characteristics.