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

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.