Title of Paper: Floating-Point Modules Targeted for Use with RC Compilation Tools

Principal Author: Dr. Clay Gloster

Abstract: Reconfigurable Computing (RC) has emerged as a viable computing solution for computationally intensive applications. Several applications have been mapped to RC systems and in most cases, they provided the smallest published execution time. Although RC systems offer significant performance advantages over general-purpose processors, they require more application development time than general-purpose processors. This increased development time of RC systems provides the motivation to develop an optimized module library with an assembly language instruction format interface for use with future RC system compilers. Hence, RC system compilation tools for C++/Java language programs can utilize these modules providing the required infrastructure for an automated RC development system that will reduce development time significantly. In this paper, we present area/performance metrics for several different types of floating point (FP) modules that can be utilized to develop complex FP applications. These modules are highly pipelined and optimized for both speed and area. Using these modules, an example application, FP matrix multiplication, is also presented. Our results and experiences show, that with these modules, 8-10X speedup over general-purpose processors can be achieved.