Partial reconfiguration (PR) is an FPGA feature that allows the modification of certain parts of an FPGA while the rest of the system continues to operate without disruption. This distinctive characteristic of FPGAs has many potential benefits but also challenges. The lack of good CAD tools and the deep hardware knowledge requirement result in a hard-to-use feature. In this paper, the new partition-based Xilinx PR flow is used to incorporate PR within our MPI-based message-passing framework to allow hardware designers to create template bitstreams, which are predesigned, prerouted, generic bitstreams that can be reused for multiple applications. As an example of the generality of this approach, four different applications that use the same template bitstream are run consecutively, with a PR operation performed at the beginning of each application to instantiate the desired application engine. We demonstrate a simplified, reusable, high-level, and portable PR interface for X86-FPGA hybrid machines. PR issues such as local resets of reconfigurable modules and context saving and restoring are addressed in this paper followed by some examples and preliminary PR overhead measurements. 1. Introduction Partial reconfiguration (PR) is a feature of an FPGA that allows part of it to be reconfigured while the rest of it continues to operate normally. PR has been the focus of considerable research because of the many potential benefits of such a feature. For example, it allows the implementation of more power-efficient designs by using hardware on-demand, that is, only instantiate the logic that is necessary at a given time and remove unused logic. PR also allows the virtualization of FPGA resources by time sharing them among many concurrent applications. Alternatively, a single large application may be implemented even if it requires more logic resources than what a single FPGA can provide as long as the logic resources are not required simultaneously. Fault-tolerant systems and dynamic load-balancing are also potential benefits of PR. All these features make PR attractive for applications in the fields of automotive and aerospace design, software radio, video, and image processing, among other markets. However, there are many challenges for PR to be more widely accepted, for example, dynamic changing of logic adds an extra level of difficulty to verification performance overheads in terms of designed target frequency and higher resource utilization complex design entry tools and PR CAD flows. A PR design requires the partitioning and floorplanning of the entire
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