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.