Transparent Trace-Based Binary Acceleration for Reconfigurable HW/SW Systems

This paper presents a novel approach to accelerate program execution by mapping repetitive traces of executed instructions, called Megablocks, to a runtime reconfigurable array of functional units. An offline tool suite extracts Megablocks from microprocessor instruction traces and generates a Reconfigurable Processing Unit (RPU) tailored for the execution of those Megablocks. The system is able to transparently movebcomputations from the microprocessor to the RPU at runtime. A prototype implementation of the system using a cacheless MicroBlaze microprocessor running code located in external memory reaches speedups from 2.2× to 18.2 × for a set of 14 benchmark kernels. For a system setup which maximizes microprocessor performance by having the application code located in internal block RAMs, speedups from 1.4 × to 2.8 × were estimated.