An approach to execute conditional branches onto SIMD multi-context reconfigurable architectures

Abstract

Reconfigurable architectures have becoming very relevant in recent years. In this paper we propose a methodology dedicated to analyze interactive applications in order to execute them in a SIMD reconfigurable architecture taking into account power/performance trade-offs. This methodology starts from a kernel description of the interactive application. Kernels are conditionally executed depending on dynamic conditions like user's input data manipulation. The volume of data involved in this kind of applications combined with user's actions occurring at unexpected times strongly impact on performance. We define an execution model to deal with conditional branches accompanied by a data prefetch scheme in order to avoid reconfigurable processing unit stalls due to operands unavailability. Experimental results satisfy time constraints of interactive applications and show a power effective solution for them.