Reconfigurable Operating System for Reconfigurable Hardware (ReconOS)

The Project:

ReconOS aims at the investigation and development of a programming and execution model for dynamically reconfigurable hardware devices. These devices, such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), are being used more and more in embedded systems but also as accelerators in general purpose computing. Being a rather new technology, dynamically reconfigurable systems are not sufficiently supported by current design methodologies and tools. Especially the unique feature of partial reconfiguration is still difficult to exploit except for hand-crafted designs.

Our Mission:

We plan to add a layer of abstraction to current design methodologies for reconfigurable systems by developing an operating system that manages the (partially reconfigurable) system resources. The operating system will raise the design productivity and flexibility to a level currently achieved only for processor-based systems.

The key points of our current research are the programming model, the execution model, and the automated generation of the runtime system:

• The programming model provides the main abstractions for the application design including the definition of hardware tasks and services for task synchronization, communication, and scheduling.
• The execution model defines the runtime system which enables multitasking in dynamically reconfigurable hardware as well as across hardware/software boundaries.
• The automated generation of the runtime system facilitates the adaptation of the operation system to different target architectures. By customization, the runtime system’s memory and logic footprints are minimized which is of utmost importance for cost-sensitive embedded systems.

Contact:

Dipl.-Ing. Enno Lübbers
Prof. Dr. Marco Platzner