From Reconfigurable Architectures to Self-Adaptive Autonomic Systems

Systems on a chip (SoC) can draw various benefits such as adaptability and efficient acceleration of compute-intensive tasks from the inclusion of reconfigurable hardware as a system component. Dynamic reconfiguration capabilities of current reconfigurable devices create an additional dimension in the temporal domain. During the design space exploration phase, overheads associated with reconfiguration and hardware/software interfacing need to be evaluated carefully in order to harvest the full potential of dynamic reconfiguration. In order to overcome the limits deriving by the increasing complexity and the associated workload to maintain such complex infrastructure, one possibility is to adopt self-adaptive and autonomic computing systems. A self-adaptive and autonomic computing system is a system able to configure, heal, optimize and protect itself without the need for human intervention.