ProDFA: Accelerating Domain Applications with a Coarse-Grained Runtime Reconfigurable Architecture

With the on-chip resources largely increased, modern architectures are much different from traditional ones. The relation between temporal computing and spatial computing is getting more and more intricate. In this paper, we first analyzed and compared the abstract computing models of modern architectures. Then, a runtime reconfigurable architecture called programmable dataflow computing architecture (ProDFA) is proposed. The architecture of ProDFA is sumarized, then the process of how applications are mapped and execute are simply introduced. As a case study, a specific reconfigurable structure for symmetric ciphers is implemented. Performance of several typical symmetric ciphers are evaluated. The experimental results show high performance and efficiency of ProDFA.