1. Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems John Huisman ID:0208506

2. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 2 Topics Introduction & Background Problems facing OS development for Reconfigurable systems Changes to the usual development tools Unresolved Issues Conclusion

3. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 3 Introduction The main purpose of an OS is to increase the abstraction between  The Application Designer  The System Software An OS would help  Reduce knowledge of hardware  Increase the runtime flexibility of reconfigurable programs

4. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 4 Introduction cont… An OS would also allow for better portability of programs Resent developments in FPGA technology have allowed the exploration into an OS  Increases in the density of hardware  Selective reconfiguration of the hardware  Ability to support many dependent and independent circuits

5. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 5 Background Few attempts to create a Reconfigurable System Operating Systems  The Xputer system OS had an extension added to communicate with reconfigurable hardware It could only handle one user at a time and used complete context switches  The SPACE.2 was also used to test an OS using multiple reconfigurable chips Used full context switching Each user had it’s own dedicated chip

6. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 6 The challenges in developing an OS for reconfigurable systems Reconfigurable systems emulate circuits and this removes many elements from a conventional OS  Lack of a defined program counter  No conventional retrieve, decode, execute cycle  Can have a varying amount of pipelines, making it harder to know how to clear the system

7. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 7 The challenges in developing an OS for reconfigurable systems In the Operating systems discussed the reconfigurable hardware  Is connected between the I/O devices and the Memory  Is a slave to the CPU, the CPU is the control of the system Makes the system very flexible Figure 1: Target Architecture composed of a host CPU, a reconfigurable device, and external components

8. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 8 The challenges in developing an OS for reconfigurable systems It should be noted that tasks that makeup the programs that run on the operating systems need to be set in a general format Serves two purposes  Increase portability of the program  The OS becomes the interface between the task and applying it on the hardware, regardless of the hardware used

9. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 9 Logic Frames To simplify the circuit outlook on the system FPGA area is viewed as a single block The block is broken into chips, then into logic frames This system works like virtual memory Figure 2: the FPGA Task Graph

10. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 10 Scheduling To schedule circuits and other parts of a program each part is broken up into task  Each task is either placed on hardware or computed on a CPU  A program is then composed of a task graph By using tasks the program is already broken down and makes it easier to for multiple users

11. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 11 Scheduling cont… With scheduling for a normal OS tasks are preempted for others all the time In a reconfigurable system it would be much harder know when to interrupt a task as the execution is more ambiguous One idea is to implement flags into the circuit to tell the OS when the circuit can be taken out

12. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 12 Scheduling cont… As reconfigurable hardware is used multiple tasks can be run in parallel from multiple users To order tasks to execute many things can be taken into consideration, notably  Priority of the program  Size of the task  Task level

13. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 13 Scheduling cont… Grouping can also be used in scheduling to help reduce communication between circuit swaps and resources needed in routing The algorithm used needs to be  Small  Deterministic  Bounded The above criteria needs to be true not only for grouping but for many of the OS operations

14. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 14 Changes to the usual development tools An OS needs to be able to start processing tasks/programs as quickly as possible with as little overhead as possible To do this the development tools used to allocate, place, and route circuits needs to be changed to fit the requirements of an OS

15. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 15 Allocation Before a circuit can be placed, adequate space needs to be found or made Two approaches to this problem  Track space taken by circuits as they are placed onto the reconfigurable hardware through an array  Scan the hardware for available space each time a new circuit is to be placed onto the hardware The first option is favorable as it would take less time to look up then scan the hardware

16. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 16 Allocation cont… If there is not enough room for the circuit to be placed onto the hardware the OS has two options  Shelf the task to run later  Remove a current task and write in the task to be placed onto the system The scheduler can help avoid the first option but if circuits are to be removed the OS must decide what to remove

17. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 17 Placement Current design tools create efficient, high quality solutions with no regard for time For an OS, the placement algorithm sacrifices the efficient use of space for speed As density of hardware increase the tradeoff of efficiency for speed can be justified

18. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 18 Placement cont… To decrease the time taken by the placement algorithm is to simplify its execution To do this two approaches to placement have been looked at  1-D resource placement model  2-D resource placement model Figure 3: Reconfigurable resource models: (a) 1D area model; (b) 2D area model.

19. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 19 Placement cont… 1-D placement  A fixed width for the reconfigurable area is used to place a circuit, dividing the area into strips  Each circuit gets its own strip of area  Simplifies the placement algorithm by increasing the constraints on the circuit  Increases the amount of unused space on the reconfigurable hardware

20. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 20 Placement cont… 2-D placement  Circuits are placed as close as possible into a rectangle and placed onto the reconfigurable area  Rectangles are used as it is easy to track used space and place new circuits  This is more complex then the 1-D model and decreases the unusable area  Increases the amount of time needed for each placement

21. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 21 Placement Results As seen above the 2-D placement method outperforms the 1- D placement in terms of tasks rejected Time increase is linearly as placement detail increases Figure 4: (a) 1D and 2D stuffing methods for different laxity classes, (b) Runtimes of the reference and stuffing schedulers to schedule one task, depending on the laxity class.

22. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 22 Routing Like placing, the routing method needs to be quick and not as accurate as the current tools As routing is NP-Hard it is hard to create a quick algorithm that can consistently generate good solutions Two approaches to simplify routing  Use more area to increase the chance of success  Use predefined routing blocks provided to the OS

23. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 23 Routing cont… Largest problem with the system is the fact that if routing a circuit fails new placements and routing needs to be done Each failure to route a circuit increases the overhead of the OS Both placement and routing methods need to be reliable else the system would be plagued by unpredictable overhead times

24. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 24 OS Operation Time Results Results from one of the papers outlining a new reconfigurable OS As the characteristic dimension decreases and/or the number of tasks increase the time increases Figure 5: The total execution time for the complete process Characteristic Dimension

25. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 25 Unresolved issues in the area No hard configuration standard for compiled general tasks representing circuits, this means OS for reconfigurable systems are only academic Most tests done on OS where done with small dependent and independent circuits, can it continue to operate when given large circuits As of yet there are no meaningful benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of a OS for reconfigurable systems

26. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 26 Conclusion As discussed there have been forward steps to the creation of an OS for reconfigurable systems As reconfigurable hardware technology increases in density and complexity, an OS will be needed Advances the prospect of software/hardware co-design

27. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 27 References 1. Steiger, C., Walder, H., Platzner, M., Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Embedded Platforms: Online Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol 53, No. 11, 2004, pg 1393-1407 2. Wigley, G., Kearney, D., The Development of an Operating System for Reconfigurable Computing, Proceedings. 20th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, 2006, pg 1-8 3. Wigley, G., Kearney, D., The First Real Operating System for Reconfigurable Computers, Proceedings 6th Australasian Computer Systems Architecture Conference, 2001, pg 130-137

28. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 28 End

29. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 29 Current Project Progress Project is to create a co-processor to speedup the operation of the Scatter Search Algorithm Working on the 0-1 knapsack problem as described by “Scatter Search, methodology and implementations in C” by Manuel Langna and Rafael Marti

30. John Huisman Operating Systems for Reconfigurable Systems 30 Current Project Progress Currently working on the implementation of the scatter search algorithm for the MicroBlaze soft-core created by Xilinx Using the Sparta 3E starter board as the host unit the MicroBlaze is applied Profile the Scatter Search algorithm to find bottlenecks Create a co-processor based on the known bottlenecks in the system