文章基本信息

标题：On the Feasibility and Limitations of Just-in-Time Instruction Set Extension for FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Processors
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作者：Mariusz Grad ; Christian Plessl
期刊名称：International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing
印刷版ISSN：1687-7195
电子版ISSN：1687-7209
出版年度：2012
卷号：2012
DOI：10.1155/2012/418315
出版社：Hindawi Publishing Corporation
摘要：Reconfigurable instruction set processors provide the possibility of tailor the instruction set of a CPU to a particular application. While this customization process could be performed during runtime in order to adapt the CPU to the currently executed workload, this use case has been hardly investigated. In this paper, we study the feasibility of moving the customization process to runtime and evaluate the relation of the expected speedups and the associated overheads. To this end, we present a tool flow that is tailored to the requirements of this just-in-time ASIP specialization scenario. We evaluate our methods by targeting our previously introduced Woolcano reconfigurable ASIP architecture for a set of applications from the SPEC2006, SPEC2000, MiBench, and SciMark2 benchmark suites. Our results show that just-in-time ASIP specialization is promising for embedded computing applications, where average speedups of 5x can be achieved by spending 50 minutes for custom instruction identification and hardware generation. These overheads will be compensated if the applications execute for more than 2 hours. For the scientific computing benchmarks, the achievable speedup is only 1.2x, which requires significant execution times in the order of days to amortize the overheads.