Standardizing the performance assessment of reconfigurable processor architectures

This paper presents the Reconfigurable Architecture TEsting Suite, or RATES, which defines a standard for describing and using benchmarks for reconfigurable architectures. RATES is a set of functional benchmarks, is totally independent from the architecture and language, and usable on any processing platform be it general purpose or reconfigurable. It requires standard algorithms to allow comparisons amongst architectures but allows custom algorithms to highlight specific features.