Dynamic Partial FPGA Reconfiguration in a Prototype Microprocessor System

Modern FPGAs´ parallel computing capability and their ability to be reconfigured make them an ideal platform to build accelerators for supercomputing systems. As a multi-core processor, the recently announced Cell Broadband EngineTMl offers tremendous computing power. In this paper, we introduce a prototype system that combines these two types of computing devices together in a reconfigurable blade and we describe its architecture, memory system and abundant interfaces. On the reconfigurable blade it is desirable that the FPGA devices can be partially reconfigured at run-time. This paper presents the dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) technique and its design flow for the reconfigurable blade. We report our experimental results of the blade doing partial reconfiguration. DPR allows the reconfigurable blade to be a powerful, run-time changeable computing engine. A sample application is presented that was both simulated for the Cell processor and dynamically loaded to run on the FPGA.