Internet booster: A networked HW/SW complex system and its application to HI-performance web application

An internet booster (IB) based on a networked hw/sw complex system is presented. The key-idea of IB is obtaining relevant WEB applications virtual hardware circuit through internet; just as same as downloading general WEB applications specific software from the server. The downloaded virtual hardware circuit is realized into an FPGA and cooperates with server´s application which is also constructed with FPGA. In order to realize IB, the networked hw/sw complex system is proposed which provides remote FPGA reconfiguration and handshake mechanism between FPGAs over the internet. In this paper, we implement WEB application as IB; where the WEB application performs real time compression, transferring and extension of video. Experimental results show that we succeed in downloading virtual hardware circuit, dynamic reconfiguration and remote operation over the internet. Besides, we also achieved full-color VGA size (24bits RGB, 640×480 pixels) video streaming with 20 frames per second using a wavelet transfer based virtual video codec. The result leads that the proposed networked hw/sw complex system and IB can provide a new WEB application program environment which features both the hispeed of hardware and the flexibility of software.