Reconfigurable accelerators for combinatorial problems

Reconfigurable accelerators can improve process time on combinatorial problems with fine-grained parallelism. Such problems contain a huge number of logical operations (NOT, AND and OR) that can evaluate simultaneously, a characteristic that varies considerably from problem to problem. Because of this variability, such combinatorial problems are approached using instance-specific reconfiguration-hardware tailored to a specific algorithm and a specific set of input data. Boolean satisfiability (SAT for short) is a common combinatorial problem that exhibits fine-grained parallelism. SAT varies considerably based on the situation. Its solution is thus an ideal candidate for improvements based on instance-specific reconfiguration. In fact, simulation of an instance-specific accelerator show potential speed-ups by a factor of up to 140,000 in execution time over the solution by a software solver. The authors detail the results of their prototype that results an order-of-magnitude speed-up in the execution of difficult satisfiability problems