A Runtime Profiler: Toward Virtualization of Polymorphic Computing Platforms

Runtime multitasking support on Reconfigurable Computers requires complicated resource management techniques in which the FPGA area has to be shared between multiple concurrent tasks dynamically. Such a resource allocation mechanism needs to know the current configuration and load of the system in order to decide about the allocation of the resources. In such systems, a runtime profiler is an important tool which can give vital information about the running applications on the system. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a runtime profiler which is responsible to produce statistics about the code running on the system. We have performed a set of experiments in order to show the overhead of our proposed profiler. The evaluation results show that the overhead imposed by the profiler is less than 1.5% of the total execution time and the information generated by the profiler is almost as accurate as a design time profiler such as gprof.